


Keep Playing My Heartstrings (Faster and Faster)

by disarm_d



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: And Friends to Friends, Bets & Wagers, Canon-typical douchery (or probably even canon-lite if we're being honest), Coming Out, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-17 15:42:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16098707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disarm_d/pseuds/disarm_d
Summary: Auston and Mitch try to win a bet by pretending to date each other, because what could be funnier than two teammates dating.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Story is done! I’ll post a new part every couple days because it was fun the last time I did that, haha. 
> 
> This is set during the season of DON’T THINK ABOUT IT. You can imagine it’s either an alternate timeline for this season in which no one got traded or a very hand-wavey version of last season. RPF is hard, you guys! It’s like you should probably try to take less than seven months to finish a story or you will get Jossed. 
> 
> The biggest thanks go to [threeturn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/threeturn), who betaed this even though she was sick (and isn't even in this fandom!!) so just the ultimate act of friendship, <3
> 
> Title from True Disaster by Tove Lo.

Auston was trying to focus on taping up his stick, but Mitch was distracting everyone trying to pick out the colour of Wingtip Oxfords he was going to order from Forzieri.

“They’re all fine,” Auston said when Mitch shoved his phone under his nose. 

“You want me to order something for you?” Mitch offered. “Free shipping.”

“Oh, for fucking --”

“It is,” Mitch said, shoving at Auston’s shoulder. “Free shipping if you order over $250.”

“That’s the price of half of one shoe,” Nazem said, sitting just down the bench. “You’re always going to get free shipping.”

“Okay, well now is included in the always, and I’m a fucking team player and letting you guys get in on this if you want.”

“This is such a Canadian problem,” Auston said. 

Mitch pointed at him. “Fuck off with your American privilege. You want to order something or not?” 

“I don’t know,” Auston said after scrolling on Mitch’s phone for a bit. “Those ones you’re getting are actually pretty bank. I’d get those as well.”

“Matching shoes,” Mitch said, with an approving, “bro.” 

“It’s cute,” Nazem said. “Young love.”

“Auston and Mitch could never date,” Freddie said. Freddie was usually so focused before a game that it was a shock to hear him speak. That might have been why Auston reacted so poorly, although that was reaching. Auston had no one but himself to blame. 

“What the fuck?” Auston said. “Of course we could date.”

“Umm, _yeah_ ,” Mitch said. “We’d be cute as fuck. We’d be like matching suits, matching Christmas sweaters. Auston would become Canadian so we’d have matching Team Canada jerseys during the Olympics.”

“I’m going to marry you, kill you in your sleep, and take your entire net worth.”

“No, he’s right, though,” Matt said. “There’s literally zero chance that you two could date. You’d be broken up in ten seconds. You guys couldn’t even date if we paid you.”

“What the fuck, Marty?” Mitch said. “I trusted you.”

“It’s true, bud,” Matt said. “Neither of you have any life skills, or, like, know about anything other than hockey.”

“You don’t know any of those things either,” Mitch fired back.

“Bro. Give me a break. I can cook like four things that don’t even involve a barbeque. I can feelings the shit out of a conversation. I already have matching Christmas sweaters with the woman I love.”

“Because Sydney bought them!” Mitch was getting louder and louder, which was hilarious, but also appreciated. Auston let him keep fighting. 

“Exactly, that’s my point. You need to have at least one person in a relationship who knows how to do shit. And that is zero of you and Auston.”

“Fact: we’re great at doing shit,” Mitch said. He looked over at Auston, so Auston nodded vigorously. 

“Name literally one thing that isn’t hockey or video games that either of you is good at.”

Mitch ignored him and instead said, “Fact: our kids would be great at hockey.”

“Fact,” Auston echoed. 

“Sweet,” Nazem said. “And so your kids would be playing for Canada or the U.S.?”

“I will straight up die before any child of mine plays for the States,” Mitch said while at the exact same moment Auston said, “They would be banned from hockey if they tried to play for Canada.”

“You guys are idiots,” Matt said. His voice was full of affection while he said it, but Auston still felt irked. 

“No, this is fucking on,” Auston said. “Mitch and I are dating now, and you guys are going to owe us a car.” 

“What?” Nazem said, laughing. 

“Yeah,” Mitch said, although then he ruined it by giving Auston a look that was clearly, _What the fuck?_ and not _Yeah!_ at all. 

“Okay,” Tyler said slowly. “And if you can’t date, which, like, obviously you can’t, you have to stand for three hours in Union Station wearing a Habs jersey.”

“No, Bruins jerseys,” James said with a manic grin. 

“I’ll wear a Coyotes jersey for an entire afternoon,” Auston tried.

“No,” said almost all the rest of the guys at once.

“Okay, so both of you, three hours minimum, like rush hour…. so four to seven or something, Bruins jerseys.”

“Or we can just blast past Union Station in the sweet ride you are going to be buying for us,” Mitch said.

“I don’t know how you think it’s possible to ‘blast’ anywhere on Front Street.”

“We’ll take Lakeshore,” Auston said. 

“Dude, do you even know where Union is?” Mitch said. “You’re making me embarrassed to be your boyfriend.”

“You’re the most embarrassing person I know,” Auston snapped. 

“I guess the real questions is where are we even going to get Bruins jerseys from?” Nazem pondered. 

Side conversations had started up again, the general din of a locker room before a game. Auston looked over at Freddie to see if he had anything else to add to the conversation, but he was either meditating or doing eye exercises or maybe he was sleeping with his eyes open. Just goalie stuff. He’d clearly checked out of the conversation entirely. 

“That escalated just like incredibly quickly,” said Mitch, quiet, so only Auston could hear. 

“You could have stopped me,” Auston said. 

“Nah, dude. We’re going to get a car. Do we both get a car? How is this going to work?”

But they had some hockey to play, so they couldn’t hash out any of the details until after that. 

\--

“I don’t want an electric car,” Auston said as he toweled off after doing media and having his shower. 

“Why not?” asked Mitch. “I’d take a Leaf. Oh, dude. A Leaf!”

“If you’re going electric, you should obviously do Tesla,” said Morgan. 

“BMW’s got one, too, right?” asked Jake. 

“I fucking said no electric,” Auston said. 

“Why does your boyfriend hate the environment?” Nazem asked Mitch.

“Babe,” Mitch said, turning to stare at Auston. 

Auston pulled away the towel he was using to dry his hair and whipped Mitch with it instead. 

“Wait, are you actually doing this?” Matt asked. 

Auston looked at Mitch, whose face made about twelve different expressions, none of them helpful.

“I think it’s hilarious,” Nazem said. “Like funniest thing that’s happened this year for sure.”

“We’ve got to talk terms then,” Jake said. “Like what do they actually have to do?”

“Bud, if you need us to explain dating to you, that’s a whole other conversation,” Ron said, clasping Jake on the shoulder. 

“It’s fair though,” James said. “They can’t just do their usual shit and get a car out of it.”

“Usual shit,” Mitch echoed theatrically. 

“Playing Chel together isn’t a date,” Nazem said. 

Auston scoffed. “Dude, what? What would be an awesome date.” 

“Did you play video games with the last girl you boned?”

“No. So?”

“So.”

“So it’s not a date.”

“I didn’t date the last girl I hooked up with,” Auston said. “False… comparison, false -- false, whatever, not a valid comparison.” 

“Tone it down, James Franco. We already know you keep your dick busy and your brain on standby.”

“Carrick plays video games with his girlfriend,” Mitch pointed out.

“She’s my fiance, dude,” Connor said. “And Lex is fucking baller.”

“The point,” Morgan said, “is that you guys have to actually date. Like, _date_. The bet is not for you to do some cute shit for the media.”

“So, what, I just have to get a picture of Auston’s dick and we’ll win this thing?” Mitch asked. 

Auston looked down at said dick, currently exposed to the entire locker room. He put one foot up on the bench, got a little power stance going. 

“Exactly,” Mitch said. And then, “Shit, wait, where’s my phone?”

“You get 112% stupider every year,” Matt said.

“112%?” Mitch repeats disdainfully. “What, you’ve been adding up fucking percentages?”

“Maybe I have.”

“No, you haven’t. What are you basing this off of?”

“Number one, common sense. Number two, all your actions and the things you say and the way you say them.”

“I hope your dick gets covered in --”

“This is fun,” interrupts Morgan. 

“Tell us more about his dick,” said Nazem with a leer. 

“Mitch has mentioned two dicks already,” Jake said. “Maybe he is taking this bet seriously…”

“My agent said he’d fire me if anyone took pictures of my dick and I’m pretty sure that includes Marns,” Auston said. It had seemed a little dramatic, like was he actually going to fire Auston? _Fire_ him? No, right? But Auston had been real responsible with that shit and he only sent pictures of, like, his dick in his underwear. Maybe just the mess on his stomach after he’d splooged and no dick at all. Subtle stuff. 

Auston looked over at Freddie, who had been silent through all of this. Sometimes he got into the locker room banter, sometimes not. It wasn’t _so_ weird that he wasn’t talking, but Auston did noticed his silence. 

He waited until Freddie looked up so that they could make eye contact, which was obviously a normal human way to check in with a person, but Freddie just leveled him with an unblinking stare, like, fuck, dude, no one’s coming at you on a breakaway. Auston made a silly face to try to get Freddie to break. He didn’t, of course, so Auston stuck out his tongue because that was kind of cute. Like specifically on snapchat with the dog filter, but whatever. 

“Hey, save that for the bedroom,” Nazem said, trying to snatch at Auston’s tongue. “And for… Mitch.” He trailed off with a face that clearly said he’d just pictured it. 

When Auston looked at Freddie again, Freddie was turned away, putting his stuff into his bag. 

\--

Mitch walked with Auston to the garage. Auston had his own car now; they’d stopped carpooling. He didn’t miss Mitch’s singing, but although he’d never admit it, he did miss having someone to drive him around. Traffic in the GTA was unrelenting.

“We doing this?” Mitch asked. “The whole time I was like, ‘Is this a joke?’”

“Dude, I don’t know.” Auston said. “It can’t actually be that hard, right?”

“Nah,” Mitch said. “I’m a fucking dreamboat. You’d be lucky to date all this.”

“Well, I guess you’re never going to get a car doing something easy…” Auston said, pretending to change his mind. Mitch shoved at him, and Auston shoved back and then he asked, “So what’s a good date?”

“Laser tag,” Mitch said immediately. 

“Oh, dude, _yeah_ ,” Auston said. He pulled up his phone to see what he could find, before pausing to think it over. “Not with you though,” he concluded, and put his phone away. 

“Excuse you.”

“Nah, cause I’d just beat you, and it’d be chill, but that’s exactly what the boys said didn’t count.”

“Firstly, you definitely wouldn’t beat me,” Mitch said. 

“You’re a terrible shot.”

“Well, you’re slow as fuck.”

“Faster than you.”

“No,” Mitch said. They were pretty close to getting into a lowkey but real fight, like they usually had a few times a week, where they went a couple of hours without speaking to each other until they forgot what they had been arguing about. The last time this happened had been yesterday, about Fortnite. 

“Whatever,” Auston said, trying to head this one off. “Dinner and a movie is a classic.”

“We already eat in the same place constantly,” Mitch complained. 

“We usually aren’t sitting together though.”

“Ugh,” Mitch said. “Marty is a little bitch when I don’t sit with him.”

“He can be there too.”

“It’s not a date when Marty’s around. Or … I guess that’s a next level date.”

“We’re not talking threesomes until we’ve been together at least three months,” Auston said. 

Mitch gave Auston a scathing look. 

“What?” Auston said. “I haven’t had any threesomes this whole year!” 

“It’s February, so that’s for starters,” Mitch said. “And then for seconders, what was it you were doing New Years Eve exactly?”

“That didn’t count,” Auston said. “I mean. Yes. Technically. So one threesome, god! Are you the fucking threesome police?”

“You guys are terrible at this,” James said. Auston hadn’t noticed him walking by, or he would have kept his voice lower. “I mean, I obviously knew you would be, but it’s somehow even worse than I had imagined? What I imagined was pretty bad. Like you guys are even worse than that.”

“My place. Dinner. Bring wine. Spend at least $30 on it. There will also be dessert,” Auston said, pretending like James had said nothing. 

James snorted and kept walking. 

When he was out of earshot, Auston said, “Don’t actually bring wine. I was just--” He flapped his hand to where James had been standing.

“Yeah, dude, obviously.” Mitch giggled. “Thirty dollars on wine. That was hilarious.”

“Google dating shit,” Auston said before he walked away. “You have to come up with the idea next time.”

\--

Auston knew how to cook nothing, obviously. He went to Loblaws and bought steaks from behind the counter, not pre-packaged, because that seemed fancy. Then he spent fifteen minutes walking up and down the other counter trying to find something that looked reasonable for a side. None of it looked great, so he got a bunch of things to make up for it: this sort of unrecognizable salad made mostly of fava beans; a quinoa, corn, and feta thing with too much parsley; another thing with quinoa that had weird long strings of spinach; an actual spinach salad that was looking real wilty; cubes of sweet potatoes in a dressing that looked like mush; and then a caprese pasta salad with whole cherry tomatoes. The small plastic containers looked too small, so he got everything in the medium ones, but apparently those weight a ton because each dish was like ten bucks, but whatever. 

They had practice but not a game. Mitch came over at five, which was objectively early for dinner except that they were all starving all the time, so Auston was ready to eat. 

For all that they had eaten together a million times before, there was something awkward about making dinner for Mitch. They weren’t just hanging out and grabbing a bite because they were hungry; they’d planned this. It was a dinner date. That was the reason why Mitch came over. 

Auston googled how to cook steak just to see if there was anything interesting that he could do that took no prep and no time. Apparently steaks tasted the best if you buttered them first. It seemed like overkill, so Auston assumed Mitch would love it. He buttered the steaks, put olive oil in the pan, took all the side dishes he’d bought out of the fridge and dumped them from the plastic containers into cereal bowls. He had more sides than bowls, so he had to put a couple on his smallest sized plates instead, but that was fine. He was fucking fancy. 

Mitch watched him cook. If it was a real date, Auston would be doing some of the, _Oh, do you want to taste this?_ crap, like get Mitch in close, try to touch his mouth -- just if there was a way of making that natural. 

But it was _Mitch_. He kind of didn’t want to show Mitch his moves. 

Mitch had this look on his face, like maybe he was thinking something similar to Auston, but Auston didn’t ask him about it. It was bad enough that they were doing this; they didn’t also have to talk about it. 

Auston put out all the sides. The individual bowls took up so much room. There wasn’t space to also have a plate with the steaks, so he just put them directly from the frying pan onto his and Mitch’s plates. 

Once they were both seated at the table, Auston left Mitch dish out first. He hadn’t put out cutlery besides the knife and folk beside each of their plates, so Mitch used the same fork to spoon out out all the different bowls. He licked the tongs between dishes to clean his fork. 

Auston wanted to say something about that, but you weren’t supposed to mention shit about _not getting your disgusting saliva all over everything, Mitch,_ while you were on a date. 

When it was Auston’s turn to serve himself, he shook the salads and crap onto his plate instead of using a fork. He got quinoa everywhere and used the flat of his hand to brush it off the table and onto the floor. 

Mitch gave Auston a nod, looking down at the spread in front of them, while he chewed on a massive bite, like, _yeah, good_.

“Eh.” Auston shrugged.

“I dunno, it’s just as good as lots of hotel food,” Mitch said. 

“Well, sure,” Auston said, and then they didn’t talk anymore over dinner. 

\--

 _Had a date with Mitch_ , Auston snapped Freddie after Mitch had left. He was shirtless because shirts sucked and he was usually shirtless at home. He’d sent Freddie a selfie yesterday, and Auston usually tried to stick to like weekly selfies only, unless there was something interesting going on that justified more. A dinner with Mitch didn’t warrant, so Auston just snapped his legs. Some of his waistband was showing, and above that a little triangle of bare stomach, but stomachs without context were pretty neutral. Like you could take a picture of just your stomach and if you didn’t have a belly button or a dick in there, it wasn’t going to be much of anything.

Freddie sent back a picture of his own legs with no additional comment. He was wearing shorts: red and shiny. They clung to his thighs even though there was also an obvious excess of fabric. 

The timer on the snap counted down and then the image went away. Auston’s eyeballs felt horny, like they wanted things to look at. He tapped around in some other snaps. There were a lot of thirst traps but too many stupid cartoon filters. He went to Instagram and right into his DMs without waiting for his feed to load. There was a whole lot of skin in his messages, but it wasn’t satiating any of his eyeball horniness, so he watched porn instead. 

His eyes were hornier than his dick, which was frankly still trying to recover from the stress of trying to dinner date Mitch. He clicked around on a lot of videos, watching the image slideshow for all the videos in the sidebar, clicking on one, slipping through, hovering for the slideshow on all the other sidebar ones. It felt like he was searching for something that would satiate his eyeballs, but nothing was really doing the trick. His dick was like, _Do I need to be involved or not?_

He thought about turning off his computer and going to jerk off in bed with his imagination like a plebe, but instead he went through his bookmarks, found the video where the girl squirts from getting her ass fucked, because that seemed impossible but also #goals. His orgasm was fine, good enough that his eyeballs seemed to calm down after that, so he closed his computer and picked his phone up instead. 

One of the notifications was a snap from Mitch, and Auston was briefly worried that it was going to be his dick, because then -- what? He’d have to get hard again and send something back. Not his actual dick, like, bare. Maybe a meaningful tent. 

Luckily it was just a boring ‘all contacts’ snap with some emojis and a clip of a tv show. Auston tapped through without letting it finish. There was another snap from Freddie after that, which Auston had either missed the first time or that came through while he was jerking off. It was a screencap of the Two Bros Chilling in a Hot Tub vine.

Fuck that, Auston thought, even though if he was being his most truthful self, just in that moment while he was alone and had to admit nothing to no one, not inviting Mitch into the kitchen had been the dinner date equivalent of sitting at the other side of the hot tub.

Freddie didn’t know that though.

So Auston went to the kitchen and grabbed a banana. This bunch had been unusually large, which worked now. He pulled the peel back a little, but thought it might be better to peel it entirely because a naked banana seemed dirtier. And then he took a video of himself putting the banana into his mouth. He waited for a second before biting down. He put the video on a loop, made really sure that he was only sending it to Freddie, and then ate that banana and a second one because he was actually kind of hungry. 

He waited for Freddie to send something back - there were a lot of easy jokes there, or maybe he could just send back another picture of his thighs. 

Freddie sent back nothing, which ruffled Auston. He wanted Freddie’s attention, but the best way to get someone’s attention was to ignore them, and since Freddie had started the precedent, it didn’t matter if Auston withdrew: Freddie had started it so the ball was still in his court. 

It was so annoying that Auston had to jerk off a second time before he was able to fall asleep.


	2. Part Two

Auston and Mitch had talked about trying to find things to do in different cities when they were on road trips, but the timing never really worked out. The next time they got together was when they were back at home and had just won a game against the Bruins. Some of the guys were going out, and Auston would have rather just done a group thing, but it had been over a week since Mitch had come to his place for dinner, and Auston was not losing this bet. 

He’d been putting in a token effort, texting Mitch a million times more than he normally would, and trying to be coupley about it. Good morning and good night and other pointless check-in stuff. It was weird to text Mitch just for the sake of texting him and not because they needed to make plans or there was something very specifically relevant to Mitch that had popped up for Auston. 

Texting him just to touch base meant that Auston was thinking about Mitch way more than he normally would - way more than he actually wanted to, if he was being honest. But in having to think about shit to text Mitch, it did feel like something more than just friends. Maybe not _dating_ , but like it wasn’t their normal bullshit, so that had to count for something. 

\--

“So what’s the verdict, boys? Week four of dating.”

“It’s fine,” Auston said. They still hadn’t come up with a definitive definition of what they needed to do to win the bet, except convince the group that they were actually dating, like actually _dating_ dating, not just bros hanging out, and that pictures of any and all body parts wouldn’t count as proof because one, no one wanted to see that and two, any of them could get pictures of any one else naked so that proved nothing.

“Yeah,” said Mitch, “no complaints.” 

“Really?” Nazem said. “What’s your favourite part?”

Auston looked at Mitch, who shrugged and said, “Auston’s real chill. Like he doesn’t have weird expectations.”

Auston nodded. “I’m very reasonable.”

“The best part about you idiots dating is low expectations. Obviously.” James was shaking his head.

“No, for real though. That would probably be the best thing about being gay or whatever. Like if you were with a dude, he’d just want the same stuff you want. You wouldn’t have to do all that extra stuff.” 

Mitch was great at bullshitting, so it almost sounded like he had a point in there. Auston wrapped his arm around Mitch’s shoulders and pressed their cheeks together, which was boyfriends as shit even though no one seemed all that impressed. 

“Blowjobs,” Jake said. 

“What?” said Tyler. 

“Blowjobs would be the best part of dating a dude.”

“Can’t wait to hear you explain this one, buddy,” said Morgan. 

“No, it makes sense,” Jake said, immediately aggressive. “Because a guy would know what feels good, and he’d also like know that it _does_ feel good, so he’d probably like blow you all the time.”

“And then you’d have to blow him,” said Zach, slow enough that it hung over the room.

“Yeah,” Jake said, recovering with reasonable speed. “But you’d be into it because you were gay. That’d be the best part of of being gay. Just like 24/7 blowjobs.”

“No, the best part of being gay is that you don’t have to sleep with women,” Freddie said. He’d been quiet for the whole conversation, and now when he chimed in, there was something so different about his tone and it cut through the rest of the chatter. 

Auston looked at Freddie. Everyone in the room was looking at Freddie, probably, but that moment Auston was exclusively aware of his own reality. 

“Pretty sure eating pussy is worse than sucking dick,” Freddie said. He was so stoic that it must have been on purpose. That much non-reaction had to be intentional.

Auston thought, _How sure are you?_ and waited for someone else to ask it. 

Instead, Brown started to say, “Straight guys don’t have to eat pussy,” before Carrick booed so loudly that it drown him out. 

“I’m saying they don’t _have_ to,” said Brown. Matt was also booing so Brown had to shout to be heard. 

“You selfish bastard,” said Matt, who was now trying to put Brown in a headlock.

It broke the tension, but in the wrong way. No one could say anything to Freddie after that without it being fucking awkward, so the conversation just dropped, like a watermelon off the top of the CN Tower. Which was waste of a watermelon and very dangerous to anyone standing below, and also probably someone needed to acknowledge what Freddie had just said, but no one did. 

Auston laced up one skate. He liked eating pussy just fine. Like, sure, if the choice was between doing something that makes his whole face kind of sore or doing something that involved his dick, he’d be like, sweet, let’s get that dick involved. But if a girl wanted him to lie down so she could sit on his face for an hour, that was super fine. Super fine and also hot enough that he’d jerked off thinking about it at least a few times. 

He jerked off thinking about blowjobs, too. Just, like. Thinking about a dick that was really hard. Someone sucking on it. Auston wasn’t the mouth and he wasn’t the dick. It was just a hot thing to think about.

He finished lacing up his other skate and didn’t think about dicks or mouths or Freddie. It was time to play some hockey.

\--

Auston found Freddie doing some cool down stretches after the game that night.

He couldn’t think of a good lead in, so he just said, “Did you come out?” 

Freddie had his legs out in front of himself. He had been sitting upright, with his back extremely straight, just leaning forward a bit, but at Auston’s question he folding down all the rest of the way until his chest was almost touching his thighs. 

“What do you think?” he replied, voice muffled. 

“It sounded like you did,” Auston said. 

Freddie sat up straight. He pulled his heels together and in, drawing into a butterfly stretch. He didn’t say anything else. 

“Why didn’t you, like, say something sooner?” Auston asked. _To me_ , he didn’t add. 

“What do you think I should have said?” Freddie asked. He bent until his forehead was touching the inner arches of his feet. 

“I don’t know,” Auston said. “I just think it would suck to be, like, closeted or whatever.”

“I’m not closeted,” Freddie said. “Have you ever heard me talk about dating women?”

“...No,” Auston said, although the truth was that he couldn’t remember. Before this conversation, if someone had asked him, he would have said for sure that Freddie had talked about being with women. But he believed Freddie when he said he hadn’t. That meant that Auston had just invented some shit in his head. He’d made up a whole play that had never been written on the board at all. 

Freddie sat up straight and then dropped backwards, still rolled up like a ball. He rocked around like that, stretching out his back. 

“I feel like I should say something,” Auston said when the length of time he had spent watching Freddie stretch had gotten to the point of weirdness. 

“Go for it,” Freddie said. His accent sounded stronger because his thighs were pushing against his diaphragm.

“I obviously don’t know _what_ ,” Auston said, trying to play it up into a joke. 

“Guess you don’t actually need to say anything then,” Freddie said. 

And, no. Apparently not. 

\--

“Yo,” Mitch answered the phone. “Why are you calling?”

“I’m in fucking gridlock,” Auston said. 

“It’s so fucking boring when people move to Toronto and complain about the traffic,” Mitch said. “Like, what, sorry that it’s great and everyone wants to live here?”

“It’s a highway and I’m moving zero,” Auston said, even though he hadn’t called to rehash this argument again. “I’m driving at actual zero miles an hour.”

“Maybe if you could remember at some point that we use kilometres here things would go a little better for you.”

“I hate this fucking bet,” Auston said to the car, although since Mitch was on bluetooth he also said it to Mitch. “I hate talking to you.”

“So don’t call,” Mitch said, and hung up the phone. 

“Oh, for fucking,” Auston muttered. Now that the phone call had ended, his music turned back on. Someone was driving along the shoulder of the highway as though it was another lane. If Auston had a hockey stick within reach, he would have stuck it out his window to try to clothesline that asshole. 

His music turned off again and he answered Mitch’s call. 

“Wait, why did you phone me?” Mitch asked.

“Dude, that was not chill in the locker room today, what the fuck?”

“Oh, with Fred?” Mitch asked. 

“Obviously.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Auston echoed. 

“I already texted him,” Mitch said. “I don’t think he’s mad at me.” 

“What did you say?”

“Just like, ‘What’s up?’” Mitch said. “We’ll do drinks or whatever.”

Auston groaned. It was such a dumb and unhelpful and Mitch-like way to go about things. 

“You can come,” Mitch said. “It won’t count as a date though.”

“Freddie said that?”

“What?”

“Freddie said I could come?”

“No,” Mitch said. 

“Then what--”

“It would obviously be fine.”

“Then how do you know it doesn’t count as a date?”

“Do you think it would?” Mitch asked. “I feel like they keep saying stuff like that doesn’t.”

Auston didn’t respond because fucking obviously. He thought about it a little. Him and Mitch on a date, and then also Freddie’s there. It didn’t seem like it would be possible to do that and have it not also be a date with Freddie. 

“I have to eat,” Mitch said. Auston had driven the length of two highway light poles in all that time. “Was that it?”

“What should we do for a date instead?” Auston asked. 

“I’ll take you out,” Mitch said. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Nothing stupid,” Auston said.

“Hundred,” Mitch said agreeably, which meant they were for sure doing something stupid. 

Auston hung up. He hated talking on the phone, but it was kind of convenient when you were driving. More like having someone in the car with you than an actual phone call. He could call Freddie next, but it seemed foreseeably obvious that that wouldn’t help much. 

Instead, he drove to Freddie’s place. 

He said, “Hey,” when Freddie answered the buzzer, and then he said, “Auston,” when Freddie said, “Who is this?” There was a pause between him saying that and the door buzzing open. Auston wanted to say, _Who else would it be?_ or Why don’t you recognize my voice? but he just waited. Eventually Freddie buzzed him in.

He knocked and Freddie opened the door. He didn’t say anything, but he took a step back to let Auston in when Auston raised his eyebrows. 

“What’s up?” Auston said, although he was never going to tell Mitch that. 

“Eating,” Freddie said, meandering his way to the breakfast bar of his island. He had two huge chicken breasts and what looked like frozen peas and corn on a plate. He hesitated for a moment before sitting back down. 

“I already ate,” Auston said, trying to cut some of the awkwardness. 

“I’m gonna,” Freddie said, looking down at his plate. He was looking at his plate a lot and at Auston not at all. He sat with his head down, turtled between the massive spread of his shoulders, before finally picking up his knife and fork. 

“You just here to watch me eat?” Freddie asked, speaking directly into his plate.

“Can we just hang a bit?” Auston said. “You can do whatever you were going to do. I’ll just chill.”

“There’s a Britta in the fridge,” Freddie said, so Auston went and got himself a glass of water even though he wasn’t thirsty. It was actually great, because it gave him something to do with both his hands and his mouth. 

When Freddie was done eating, Auston reached over and grabbed his plate. Freddie’s appliances were paneled and Auston couldn’t remember which of the identical-looking cupboards was secretly a dishwasher, so he gave the plate a little scrub in the sink instead. He tried to wash his glass after that, but when the glass was covered in suds and his hands were slick with soap and water, he managed to drop it hard enough in the sink that it shattered. 

“Aw, fuck,” Auston said. 

Freddie came over to help, but as soon as he was close enough, Auston’s arms reached out, almost without any connection to his brain, and wrapped around Freddie tightly. They were pretty much the same height, but when Auston pressed his cheek to Freddie’s shoulder, it felt like hugging someone taller. 

“Sorry I broke your glass,” Auston said into Freddie’s collarbone. 

“You are not good at doing the dishes.” Freddie gave Auston a couple of hard pats on the back, which Auston took as a hint to release him from the hug. Freddie didn’t go too far once Auston had let go. He picked up both of Auston’s hands and said, “Did you cut yourself?”

Auston shook his head, but let Freddie look him over. 

“How do I clean it?” Auston asked. “It’s all over the sink.”

“That would have been more of a problem if you’d actually filled the sink with water,” Freddie said. “The way most people do when they wash the dishes.”

“Then all the food floats around,” Auston said. “That’s fucking gross.”

They used paper towel to pick up all the little pieces of glass, and Auston did manage to cut himself after all. He didn’t feel it at first, only noticed when there was a smear of red on his paper towel. 

Freddie noticed at the same time he did and wanted to get him a bandaid, but Auston said nah and wrapped it with a paper towel until the bleeding stopped. 

“You have to put pressure,” Freddie said, after the sixth time that Auston had pulled the paper towel away to discover the cut was still bleeding. It was just a little nick on the side of his index finger, but it was really beading up. 

Freddie did it for him: wrapped his finger and held the paper towel in place, his thumb resting firm and gentle over the cut. 

“If this doesn’t work, we’ll just chop it off,” Freddie said, and then Auston had to pretend to try to get away, and Freddie had to chase after him until he was kind of wrapped around all of Auston, not just his finger. 

He froze when Auston stopped squirming, like he had just caught himself, but this was pretty much exactly what Auston had been angling for when he started making a fuss, so he leaned back heavily on Freddie and waited for him to unclench. 

Freddie never really relaxed, and eventually they just left the kitchen and turned on the XBox. That helped. After like twenty minutes it was back to feeling just like any other night. 

“See,” Auston said, tilting sideways to bump shoulders with Freddie, “this could totally count as a date.”

Freddie was silent. Maybe not just like any other night then. 

They played until they both died and then while they were waiting for the level to reload, Auston said, “Why isn’t video games a date?” He ticked off on his fingers: “Shared interest, joint activity, something that’s fun for both of us.”

“I don’t know, dude, why is playing shimmy with your buddies different than a gangbang? Jesus.”

“You don’t have to have sex for it to be a date.”

Freddie leveled him with a stare, like, _Obviously_. 

“Everyone’s just trying to make it harder for us.”

Freddie shrugged. 

“Dude, what?” Auston asked. “I feel like you hate this thing even more than I do, but I don’t get why.”

“No, it’s great,” Freddie said, deadpan. “What could be better than watching my two straight teammates pretend to date each other as a joke?”

“We are dating,” Auston said, even though he knew even before he had said it that it was the wrong thing. 

Freddie looked up at the ceiling. It seemed like he might be pissed, but it could also be that he was stretching his eyes. 

“I mean -- ” Auston’s tongue went suddenly huge in his mouth as his brain flashed hysterical nothingness. “Umm. Because the bet was to. It was a bet to date. Not, um.”

“So you’re going to suck Marner’s dick,” Freddie said, his voice as flat as it got if someone tried to talk to him before a shootout.

Auston winced without meaning to, and Freddie turned away again. The level was loaded, and Freddie clicked to start it. Auston pressed pause immediately. 

“I’m not supposed to ask how long you’ve known you were gay,” Auston said, because that was the only way he could think of to ask how long Freddie had known he was gay. 

“You’re so bad at this,” Freddie said, but it wasn’t angrily. 

“Did you just always know?” Auston asked. That would be kind of easy, he supposed. If it had just always been one thing or another. 

“I’ve had sex with women before,” Freddie said. “I’m not gold star.”

”And?”

“And what?”

Auston shrugged. 

Freddie looked at Auston and then down at the controller. It seemed like he was making a decision. Instead of picking the controller up, Freddie folded his fingers together and then put his hands behind his head. He was taking up so much fucking space like this, his elbows out like wings. 

Auston put his own controller down on the floor, and twisted so that his back was resting against the arm of the couch. 

“Would you ever have sex with a woman again?” he asked.

“Nah,” Freddie said.

“So it was bad?”

“Nah,” Freddie said again. He had world’s tiniest smile edging up the corners of his lips, which meant he was fucking with Auston on purpose, so Auston was allowed to keep bugging him. 

“So you liked it?”

Freddie looked up at the ceiling, his head held in his hands. 

“You’re okay at baseball,” Freddie finally said. Auston felt his stomach drop, because he had thought -- he didn’t know they were done talking about it. He didn’t reply. 

“You could quit hockey and try to play baseball,” Freddie said, ignoring the scowl Auston gave him. “And you might actually make it. Probably not, but…” 

Auston cracked a grin. 

“But even if you did make it, you’d wish you were playing hockey. Because baseball is fine, but hockey’s the best fucking sport.”

“Obviously,” Auston said. 

Freddie nodded. It was in response to what Auston had said, but still somehow it felt like he was nodding to himself. 

“Baseball is easier. I mean, more games, but it’s not contact. You’re probably not going to get a concussion.”

Auston clicked his tongue and pretended to examine his palms. “Don’t know if I could cope with the blisters…”

“You’d never make it as a pitcher,” Freddie said. He was smirking. It made him look older. Auston’s mother would call him handsome. “No chance.”

“You got a point to this or are you trying to help free up some cap space next year? I’m not actually going to quit hockey to try to make a go of it in baseball.”

Freddie let his hands fall back to his sides, but it still seemed like he was taking up just as much space. “More people watch baseball,” he said. “You could go back to the States.”

“No,” Auston said, slowly and clearly. 

Freddie shrugged. His smirk had turned into a little open mouthed smile. Auston looked at it until Freddie’s face went back to normal. 

Apparently the conversation was done after that. 

They played a little more Fortnite. Freddie sucked and didn’t like to be reminded of it. Auston went back home. 

It was such a random conversation that Auston replayed it in his head late that night in bed after he had jerked off. 

He realized what Freddie meant just before he was about to fall asleep.


	3. Part Three

Mitch took them ax throwing on their next date. Apparently there was supposed to be a minimum number of people to book the … lane, or whatever the area in front of the target was called, but Mitch had paid to rent the entire studio. There were a couple of women who showed them how to throw the axes, and where to put their beer (they could bring it in and drink it, but the place wasn’t allowed to sell alcohol for some stupid reason), and kept track of who was scoring more points on a whiteboard behind them. 

Mitch was winning, technically, just based on the number of points he had, but Auston could throw harder for sure. 

They took a selfie, each pretending to kiss the bullseye. If it was a real date, they would have pretended to kiss each other. Or they wouldn’t have pretended; they just would have kissed. 

Auston liked ax throwing. You lunged forward, the ax dropped back behind your head, and tried to throw it with the right number of spins so that it would hit the target blade-side forward. Auston could always hit the target, but sometimes he got it with the handle instead of the blade. 

It would have been more fun if they’re brought a group though. The minimum number of people was for a reason. With just him and Mitch, they were always throwing, never waiting. It felt like a workout more than anything else. 

They went back to Auston’s place afterwards, and sat on the couch. They were supposed to figure out what they were going to do for their next date together, but so far all they’d managed was to sit in mostly silence, each with a phone in front of his face. 

“What do you think it would be like to actually date a guy?” Auston asked. He still had his phone held up, but he was just looking at his home screen. Freddie had never sent him another snap after the banana one. It had kind of ruined Snapchat for Auston.

Mitch was quiet for so long that Auston thought he was just ignoring the conversation entirely, but finally he said, “I guess I did before, kind of. In juniors.”

“You dated a guy?”

“We didn’t… like obviously we never talked about it or anything, but I was thinking about it afterward, and like there was this whole group I was really close with but I was different with this one guy.” 

“Different how?”

“Just like, we’d do a lot of stuff just the two of us, and … I don’t know how to explain it. He was really nice to me.”

“I’m nice to you,” Auston said. 

“No, like he was really nice. Like he’d bring me food and we’d go places, so it was kind of like a picnic. That sounds stupid when I say it out loud. It wasn’t actually a picnic. We just spend a lot of time together. He used to touch me, uh. Differently.” 

“Like on the dick.”

Mitch shook his head. He leaned towards Auston, and said, “Stop it,” when Auston leaned backwards. “I’m going to show you.”

Mitch reached over and ran his hand down Auston’s arm. His hand traveled over Auston’s t-shirt, which covered his upper arm, but then when he got to the cuff of the shirt, he dragged his thumb under the hem, like he was trying to touch as much of Auston’s bare skin as possible. The gentleness felt like an ache all the way down from his skin, raising up in goosebumps, to his bones. Auston’s fingers twitched, and he only just restrained himself from shoving Mitch away. 

“Don’t do that,” Auston said, when Mitch had finally pulled away. He crossed his arms and rubbed over his tingling skin with his own hand, like the touch was something he could wipe away. 

“Don’t be so fucking jumpy. It’s just your arm.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Auston said. He was going to pull his legs up so that he could kick Mitch to the other side of the couch, but then he had a different idea. Instead, he used the closeness Mitch had created by scooting over, and grabbed for Mitch’s knee. His leg was kind of thin just above his knee before it filled out with muscle. Auston ran his hand up the line of Mitch’s leg. He wasn’t as gentle as Mitch had been because he wanted to make sure Mitch could feel it through his jeans. 

Auston looked at his hand travelling up Mitch’s leg, then looked up to check in with Mitch. Mitch was staring down at Auston’s hand. His face was blank, which made Auston want to do something to get a reaction. He rubbed his hand up higher until he was at Mitch’s thigh, and then let his fingers start sliding in.

It wasn’t that different from doing this with a girl. You go high enough up the thigh and you get _something_. It would feel different to touch Mitch’s actual dick, but this slow slide up his leg, the anticipation, the tease of it, that was the same. That was just sex. 

“Jesus, stop,” Mitch said. His leg twitched like he wanted to squeeze his thighs together, but that would just trap Auston’s hand. That would be the opposite of stopping.

“Oh no,” Auston said mockingly. “Don’t be so jumpy, it’s just your leg.”

“You’re like an inch away from my dick,” Mitch said. 

“Nah,” Auston said, twitching his fingers threateningly. “Your dick isn’t that big.”

“Or maybe you’ve just got small hands,” Mitch said. 

Auston dug his knuckle into Mitch’s thigh as hard as he could before he let go. Mitch yelped.

“This is what you did with your friend?” Auston asked. “I mean, boyfriend. Person. Fuck.”

“Oh, yeah,” Mitch said, still rubbing his leg. “I love the pain.”

“Ew, really?” Auston asked, even though it already felt like a conversation that he didn’t want to have. 

“No, and you’re fucking terrible at this,” Mitch said. “We didn’t sit around hitting each other in the leg, god.” 

They ended up wrestling on the floor. Mitch resorted to biting way too quickly, and Auston knocked over his coffee table when he jerked back in surprise. Nothing was broken, but the batteries for the remote rolled everywhere when it fit the floor and they had to crawl around trying to find the last one. 

Auston looked at Mitch, who was on all fours, dropped forward as he tried to peer under the couch. This would be the time to kiss him. Auston could crawl over, wait for Mitch to poke his head back up again. It would be a little funny, the sudden proximity. Mitch would laugh and Auston would wait until his mouth had settled down again before leaning in for a kiss. 

Auston didn’t want to, but he was tempted anyway. At least then it would be done. Ax throwing and then making out: that was a real date. No one could argue with that. 

Instead, he stood, helped Mitch off the floor, and led him out the door so that they could go buy more batteries. 

\--

_What’s the best date you ever had?_ Auston texted Freddie. He couldn’t use Snapchat because Freddie still hadn’t replied.

Freddie texted back, _??_

_You heard me_

_I don’t know_

_Take a guess_ , Auston texted. 

_More about the person then what you do_ , Freddie replied after way too long a pause for a complete non-answer. 

_Who’s the best person you dated_ , Auston thought but didn’t send. He stared at the screen without typing anything. It wouldn’t show a text bubble, and he’d taken off read receipts. Probably better to leave it like that. Best guess was that Freddie wouldn’t reply to whatever he sent next anyway, and he didn’t want to add a texting standoff to the Snapchat one. 

He kept touching his screen to keep his phone awake. There was no reason for it, since he’d already decided that he was done. Despite the fact that he was staring right at the screen, he almost missed that Freddie had texted again because his phone didn’t buzz. 

_I can show you_ , Freddie said.

Auston wanted to ask, _What?_ but he couldn’t risk fucking it up, so he just texted back, _Yes_.

\--

They played Tampa and went out afterwards because their next flight wasn’t until tomorrow and no one other than the Canadian snowbirds really cared about hockey in Florida. 

“We’re getting sloppy tonight, boys,” Nazem said, busting into William and Kasperi’s room, where they had all started pre-drinking. The music was loud enough that they would for sure be getting noise complaints. Auston was dancing with Carrick. They were going hard, like actually getting in to it, and Austin was going to be sweaty before they even got out. 

Matt had a bottle of Crown Royal, and every time Austin danced over to him, Matt would pour some right into his mouth, which was always followed by a fist bump from Mitch, who was currently being sat on by Matt. Mitch had his arms wrapped around Matt’s waist, and he only let go for first bumps before he was right back to acting as Matt’s seatbelt. 

Auston looped back around to Carrick, who was doing this real smooth roll from his shoulders all the way to the tips of his fingers. Auston was pretty sure he could do it even better. And then he did, even though Carrick said no and tried to kick him in the knee. 

Auston didn’t even know that someone had called a cab, but then he was in it. How many cabs had they called? Austin hadn’t been part of it and now he was sitting in the back and what if he had taken someone else’s seat? But it was too late for that because already they were at the club. Had someone also phone to let them know they were coming? Because they didn’t have to wait at all, and Auston hadn’t even had to explain that he was Auston Matthews. He was always the one who had to do that when they needed to get in places. 

“Bud, you definitely told them like twelve times who you were,” Tyler cut Auston off when Auston tried to explain that. 

And, oh? Had he? Who had ordered the drink in Auston’s hand? It was like a fairy went around taking care of things for him tonight. 

“Look after Bobo the Clown over here,” Tyler said, passing Auston over to, oh, Freddie! Freddie hadn’t been drinking with them and Austin hadn’t known if he was going to come. 

“Yes, I was,” Freddie said. 

In the room? He had been drinking with them in the room?

“Yeah, when I got there I think you were trying to limbo between Carrick’s legs.”

Auston couldn’t remember doing that, but he had no doubt that if he had wanted to, he would have pulled that off for sure. 

There was something new in his hand and he thought it was vodka but it was actually water. Or a very watered down drink, which was basically the same thing. The problem was that no one was dancing, and Auston wanted to be dancing. So he went off to do that. 

Someone grabbed Auston’s ass and it turned out to be Willie, which was great because then they started grinding. Willie kept laughing and laughing, and his face was so hilarious red that Auston laughed too. Matt was there, and so was Mitch, and also a bunch of other people and it was awesome. Auston could dance with anyone. Sometimes they would give him their drinks, and only twice did Morgan have to intervene when the people passing Auston drinks turned out to be strangers. It was so hard to keep strangers and friends separate. It was kind of like everyone was his friend, really, and it was just a matter of figuring out the details of that. 

“I should record you,” Freddie said. They were in the back of another cab. Auston only remembered being outside for like one second. He never agreed to head back to the hotel. “You’re fucking hilarious tonight.”

They should have gotten a car service instead of a cab. Like one of the good ones where there was alcohol in a little cooler thing. 

“The worst thing is that you’re going to be totally fine tomorrow, aren’t you?” Freddie said. 

Auston didn’t remember how it happened, but they were holding hands. Auston wanted to see what it would feel like if he rubbed his cheek over Freddie’s knuckles, but Freddie was immovable. He was a wall. They were so lucky to have him. His hands looked like they were made for touching. 

\--

Auston woke up and it was still dark. He thought, _Nope_ , rolled over, thought again, and headed to the bathroom to throw up. It was easy to throw up because of how every part of the known universe was spinning. Auston hardly even noticed it coming up, just _blehh_ into the toilet and then that was better and he could go back to bed. 

He slept through the rest of the night, and woke up with a little nausea and a headache, but more like he was really hungry than anything else. 

“You don’t deserve your youth,” Matt said over breakfast. “Like that’s the thing. Someone should be allowed to take it away from you.”

Auston smiled around the fifth piece of bacon he had currently jammed into his mouth. 

“Don’t take his youth,” Mitch said while he covered his eggs in ketchup. “I can’t be dating an old guy.”

“Obviously,” Matt said, a weird edge to his voice. 

It took Auston a minute to figure out what they were talking about, because he wasn’t feeling _great_ , although he’d eaten about four scrambled eggs and that was really starting to help. Oh yeah, the bet. Auston hoped he remembered to dance with Mitch last night when he was dancing with everyone else.

All he really remembered from the night before was holding hands with Freddie in the back of the cab, and that was probably the one thing he actually needed to forget, so he imagined his brain was a stream and the thought was a twig and he sent it away.

\--

Auston and Mitch tried to go for a walk along the river when they were in Chicago, because that was some romantic shit, but it was too fucking cold. Auston was wearing gloves, and his hands were still cold. His nose was, like, gone, probably. 

Regardless, it was still rude when Mitch bailed on their walk halfway through to go hang out with Matt at the hotel. 

“It’s date night,” Auston said. 

“And we’ve dated,” said Mitch. “We’re just going to watch a movie or something. You can probably come.”

“Gee thanks. _Probably_ ,” Auston said, and then spun off and marched in the other direction. 

He walked that way just long enough that he was sure he wouldn’t catch up with Mitch on the way back to the hotel (which was a pretty quick time because Mitch had short pipe cleaners for legs) and then headed back himself, because annoyance at being ditched only did so much in helping to heat him up. 

He ran into William in the lobby, just sitting there. 

“What are you doing?” Auston asked, walking over to William. 

“We’re heading out somewhere and everyone is late,” William said with the genuine chill that only someone who grew up in a big family could have. 

So Auston waited around and eventually some of the other guys started rolling in and they all headed out. No one had looked up a place to go, of course. They wandered around for a while. It was still fucking cold. Finally Zach called someone in PR, who found them a destination.

They settled in to a couple of booths at this place that was a more a lounge than a club. There was a mixture of proper tables and clusters of armchairs around low coffee tables. That was probably supposed to make it feel comfortable, but it was pretentious as fuck in the wrong way. Auston liked things that were edgy-pretentious, not pretentious in the d-bag way. 

He texted Freddie, who replied faster than usual to say he wasn’t coming. Some of the guys were trying to pick up, and maybe Auston would have tried too, but he still had to win that stupid bet, so instead he headed back to the hotel. There were some staff hanging out in the bar by the lobby, so Auston chatted with them for a bit, and then got Freddie’s room number from one of them and headed there. 

It was a weird kind of night. Everywhere Auston turned, there were people for him to hang out with; they were in another city, but it kind of felt like they had taken over. The ease of finding _someone_ was obviously the best thing about being on a team, but for some reason he just couldn’t settle tonight. 

Freddie took a minute to open the door. In that time, Auston thought, _What if he’s jerking off?_ and then he thought of about twelve different jokes Freddie could make about being interrupted, and then, like. They’d both be thinking about Freddie jerking off. 

But Freddie didn’t say anything like that. He had BNP Paribas Open playing on the TV, and if there was one guy in the building who was for sure not jerking off to women’s tennis, it was probably Freddie. Auston didn’t actually know. Maybe Freddie’s boner for tennis existed on a realm that surpassed gender. 

“Can I watch with you?” Auston asked. Freddie hadn’t said anything, but the arch of his eyebrow communicated epics. 

“Yeah,” Freddie said, giving Auston this unexpectedly sweet smile. 

Auston had to be a jerk when he got to the bed because he had never warmed up from his first walk and the trip back from the lounge had made it worse; he lifted up the covers and climbed properly into Freddie’s bed. Maybe it would have been better to try to find a blanket somewhere, but Auston just. Wanted to get into bed. 

Freddie seemed to pause a minute before he did the same, and then they were both under the covers. Auston couldn’t stop moving around, somehow even colder at first, but the blankets heated up quickly (because of Freddie. Because Freddie was there) and eventually Auston settled. 

Freddie was the chatty one for once. He had a lot of opinions on how it compared to the Miami Open, and whether or not the Williams sisters should ever have come back after their boycott, and on every single call made by the refs. 

Auston had thought he was going to zone out, because tennis was just boring enough to be soothing, but it was a fucking experience watching it with Freddie, who was somehow both very cozy, all bundled up in bed, and very, _very_ alert about every single thing happening on the TV. It wasn’t even that big of a TV. Auston didn’t know how he could see the ball well enough to have an opinion about if it was in or out on these calls of infinitesimally small degrees before the instant replays even showed. 

Auston stayed there until it was curfew. On the way back to his own room, he ran into Mitch. They bumped fists, and didn’t say anything else. Mitch had just come from Matt’s room; Auston didn’t know if it would be obvious to Mitch that he’d just come from Freddie’s. 

Auston thought it would be funny, after everything, if he pushed Mitch up against the ice machine to give him a goodnight kiss, but like. It wouldn’t have been _that_ funny. 

They went back to their own rooms. 

\--

They went to Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver. Babcock wanted Auston to do more open ice work, because he was fine in the corners but he’d been having some trouble clearing the puck. Freddie needed to work on getting around a screen, so they spent a while after one practice with James standing right in Freddie’s face while Auston tried to snipe it in from the blue line. All three of them were pretty mad by the end of that exercise; James most of all because Auston had definitely got him in the shoulder when he was trying to go top shelf at least two times. 

They waited in airports and time dragged. They played a game and it was over in the blink of any eye. People had mostly forgotten about the bet, but Auston was still lowkey dating Mitch. It was sort of the longest relationship Auston had ever had. Usually, Auston did the It’s Chill thing for a really long time and then had everything fall apart pretty fast after they put a label on it. So it wasn’t like he’d never fucked someone for longer than he’d been dating Mitch, but he’d never been someone’s boyfriend, properly, for such a long time. 

It made him think that he was probably better at this relationship shit than he’d given himself credit for. A shame to be wasting it all on Mitch. 

\--

_You going to show me what a good date looks like?_ Auston sent. 

They were back in Toronto for five days, so it seemed like a safe time to send the text. Even if Freddie was busy tonight or tomorrow, there would probably be some time in there that he was free. And if there wasn’t, it meant he didn’t want to. Which would also be good to know. 

It took long enough for Freddie to text back that Auston almost wished he had read receipts turned on. Freddie had seen it or he hadn’t. Other times that they’d hung out, Auston had seen Freddie notice a message on his phone and then put the phone back in his pocket, message unanswered. He’s also seen Freddie go hours without pulling out his phone at all. 

Auston went on Instagram and scrolled through his DMs. If Freddie didn’t message back, Auston was going to have to find someone else to fuck tonight, because this was getting ridiculous. If he wanted someone new, he’d go on Instagram; if he wanted a repeat he’d go on Snapchat. He hadn’t decided yet. Right now, he was just looking through to find pictures girls had sent him because whatever. It was almost ruder not to look. 

He went into the kitchen to mix protein powder in water for a snack. He felt his phone buzz in his pocket and didn’t take it out until he’d drunk the entire glass, because he wanted it to be Freddie, and it probably wasn’t, and as soon as he pulled out his phone he’d know for sure that it wasn’t, and at least this way he had control. 

He chugged the water. Grabbed his phone. It was Freddie. 

_Yeah. What are you doing tonight?_


	4. Part Four

_I’m going on a date with Freddie tonight_ , Auston sent Mitch against a background of a selfie Auston had taken in the reflective metal of his elevator. Freddie still hadn’t sent him any snaps, but Auston had started using the app again, because, what? He was never going to use Snapchat for the rest of his life? 

He and Freddie were meeting downtown at 8, which seemed pretty early, especially considering they weren’t having dinner together, but whatever. Neither of them drove because they both drove. Auston found street parking on only his third weave around, so that was a minor miracle. He was nervous with no reason for it, which was the worst kind of nervous to be. He was just meeting Fred. 

Freddie had shaved, and was wearing a Raptor’s cap and a peacoat that was not done up. He looked like the kind of person who would give a TED Talk. He nodded at Auston when Auston walked up, left his hands jammed into his pockets. 

“I want street meat,” Freddie said. 

Auston looked around. They’d just walked by a vendor, but the one further down the street had a smaller line, so they kept walking towards that one. 

Auston bought one for himself, because, whatever, they did smell good. He bought Freddie’s, too, without really realizing he was going to. He let Freddie get to the condiments shelf first on purpose. He looked at Freddie’s shoulders while Freddie loaded up his hot dog. Freddie’s jacket was the right size for him. It fit him just right. 

Freddie glanced over his shoulder, caught Auston looking and just stepped aside enough that Auston could reach the condiments as well. 

“Killed it,” Auston said, adding the final flourish of bacon bits. 

Freddie looked at Auston’s hot dog, which was glorious, and then down at his own, which was like jalapenos bathing in mustard... was there even a weiner under all that garbage?

“Okay, that does look good,” Freddie said, but then before Auston could start to crow, he said, “can I have it?”

“But I made it,” Auston said. 

“Yeah,” Freddie agree. He held out his hot dog, like they were actually going to do this. “You can have mine.” 

Freddie grinned, just like. Sweet. Not teasing. Or maybe kind of teasing, but not like this was a joke. 

Auston gave him his hot dog. 

Mayo got caught in the webbing between Freddie’s thumb and and hand. He licked it off with a loud wet sound, like he knew he was being gross and somehow that made it cute. Auston wanted to feign annoyance, but the whole stupid date atmosphere was making him soft. He liked feeding Freddie. He liked watching Freddie eat a proper hot dog that Auston had made the right way. 

“You did that on purpose,” Auston said.

Freddie quirked one side of his mouth. “Kinda. It was good though.”

They walked around. Spring was being a tease and continued very slowly to take hold of the city. The days were starting to get lighter, but it was still pitch black before they even met. Auston felt his phone buzz in his pocket a few different times and ignored it completely. He wished that he and Freddie were holding hands, and then gave his brain a good hard slap for coming up with such an embarrassing thought. 

They walked to Trinity Bellwood, which was absolutely dire this time of year and yet still pretty busy because everything was always pretty busy in Toronto. The thickest of the ice had mostly melted, but it was still slippery, thick puddles of mud crusted over with the last of the snow. The trees stood out of the barren ground like toothpicks. All around them, people were trying to take their dogs for walks. 

When they walked out the other side of the park, Freddie put his hand on Auston’s back to steer him right instead of left, and he left if there for the time it took them to walk down the block and to the Rhum Corner. There were no tables, so they sat at the bar. Freddie saw the slushy machine and got a cucumber shiso daiquiri, so Auston got the same, and they shared the special, which was some kind of meat stew with huge hunks of bone over a lentil mash. 

It was good. The drinks were good. Freddie took off his coat and was wearing a green henley with the buttons done all the way up. He was so fully clothed that it was impossible not to think about his body. His thigh was pressed against Auston’s. They talked about whether or not it was a good idea to toll the Gardiner and the DVP, and how they thought the Jays were looking, and when they were going to take the snow tires off their cars. Auston could smell Freddie’s cologne. Maybe it was his shampoo. Auston wanted to put his face in Freddie’s neck and find out. He wanted to put his hand on Freddie’s thigh. He didn’t know how Freddie could keep chatting like this was all normal. 

Freddie paid. Except for stupid credit card roulette nights with the boys, no one ever paid for Auston. He watched Freddie tap his pin into the machine and tried to stop being turned on by every stupid part of this stupid night. 

They walked back to where they had started. Soon the night would be done. Auston felt like he had unlocked a cheat code that gave him Freddie’s undivided attention and now he didn’t want to turn the game off. 

“Aren’t you going to ask if it was a good date?” Auston said. 

Freddie lifted one shoulder.

“All we did was eat,” Auston said. “Is this what you do on real dates?” He wanted to add _with dudes_ , but that went without saying. Freddie didn’t have real dates with anyone other than dudes. 

“Nah,” Freddie said. His hands were tucked into his pockets. He was looking at something down the street, but Auston didn’t know what. 

“I would have driven,” Freddie said after enough time had passed that Auston thought the conversation had dropped. “I can’t kiss you like this, in public. Not when we’re in Toronto, anyway.” Freddie changed direction suddenly, and Auston followed him into an alley. Not an alley alley, like where Batman’s parents were murdered, but one of those little driveways behind buildings that didn’t look wide enough for even one car and yet still had a smaller than normal street sign. An alley with a name. 

“What are you -- this isn’t a car,” Auston said, dumbly. 

Freddie said nothing. He leaned back against the wall, which was concrete halfway up and then turned into brick. 

“Are you still going to do it?” Auston asked. He didn’t know where to stand. He could lean against the wall as well, but then they wouldn’t be facing each other. He could lean against the opposite wall, but that was too far. 

“Nah,” Freddie said. 

Auston took a step closer. “Why not?” he asked. 

Freddie let his chin dip so they were eye to eye, sort of. He said, “Wasn’t that good a date,” and grinned. 

“Fuck off,” Auston said. He was right in front of Freddie now. 

Freddie pressed his palms flat to the wall, fingers spread. He didn’t try to touch Auston at all. 

“Why not?” Auston said again. 

“I like your hair like this,” Freddie said. It was flopping across his forehead, parted deeply to one side. Auston wanted to flick it out of his eyes. If he was on a date with a girl, she would have brushed it away for him already. That would be a good lead in to a first kiss, because he’d know then that she wanted him. 

Auston said, “Thanks,” and blinked a few times, like that would help the thoughts come faster. 

“Does this feel like hanging out with a friend?” Freddie asked, and Auston said, “No,” without thinking through any of the shit that implied. 

“What if we went back to your place to play Fortnite?”

Auston opened his mouth and then closed it again.

“Would it feel like buddies, or would you be thinking about if I was going to kiss you?”

“It would… I don’t -- This was my whole freaking point,” Auston finally managed to spit out. Freddie was doing some Jedi bullshit but it would take more than that for Auston to forget that he was winning the argument. 

“No, _my_ point was that playing Playstation with Mitch didn’t feel like a date.”

“You’re seriously not going to kiss me?” Auston asked. He meant to sound outraged, but he overshot and landed on desperate. 

Freddie chucked him under the chin. Auston dropped his jaw, tried to set his teeth into Freddie’s hand. Freddie let him. Auston caught his first finger between his teeth, and Freddie didn’t move away.

Auston unclenched his jaw enough that Freddie could get away it he wanted, but it was a minute before Freddie moved, and when he did it was just to touch his thumb to the roundest part of Auston’s lower lip. Auston’s tongue was right there and it felt almost impossible not to lick Freddie. He made himself hold still. He thought about Freddie putting his fingers in his mouth and didn’t know whether or not to want it. 

Freddie pulled his hand away before Auston had decided. 

“You should get caught kissing Mitch,” Freddie said, turning and walking back towards the street. “The boys really don’t want to buy you a car.”

\--

It took Auston a long time to fall asleep that night. He felt ramped up, like it was time to go play a game but happier, sort of. He thought about texting Freddie five different times and then immediately halted those thoughts. 

When he went to bed it was mostly just to jerk off, and still it took him a while to go. He was like real hard right away, but then he kept thinking about everything that had happened that night, or like… not thinking, remembering. His thoughts kept leaning over to poke at his memories of the night like he had to keep checking that he hadn’t embarrassed himself. It did nothing to diminish his boner. 

He tried to refocus on something chill like porn, but one second he was think about that video where the blonde got fucked up the ass in the kitchen and then he was thinking about fucking Freddie. He wasn’t, like, one hundred percent sure that it was a good idea, but he stuck with that, because that’s where his brain wanted to be and who could really control brains all the time. 

He thought about being behind Fred, Fred’s whole huge back, and his ass, and his hands, twisting at the sheets, maybe, or reaching back to try to touch Auston. It didn’t take Auston long to come after that. 

\--

Auston and Mitch had a pretty regular schedule to their dates, which actually worked out great and was something that Auston would want to keep when he was actually dating someone for real. It was so nice to have it fit in like any other part of his routine. 

Thursdays were movie nights. Today they were in Winnipeg, so they were just watching Netflix in the hotel. The greatest discovery of the season was when they realized how easy it was to pack the Chromecast and then they could watch whatever they wanted off the laptop. 

It was pretty easy, just like every other part of their dating, except that Matt was a jealous bitch about Auston getting solo time with Mitch and kept adding movies they weren’t allowed to watch without him to what was now an impossibly long list. 

“How did it go with Freddie?” Mitch asked, lying on the bed next to Auston. During one of their earlier dates, Nazem had busted in with Morgan and they’d given Auston and Mitch shit for the entire rest of the week for claiming that sitting on separate beds and watching a movie counted as a date. Now they always lay on the same bed, and at least one of them would take off his shirt. 

“Fine,” Auston said. He was shirtless tonight. He liked not wearing a shirt, obviously, but it was annoying how the skin of his arm kept sticking to Mitch. Neither of them were sweating or anything, so why was their skin always sticking together? 

“So he like fully schooled you,” Mitch said, smirking. 

Auston grumbled and shoved his palm, which still stunk from his gloves even though he showered after the game, at Mitch’s face. 

“Well, obviously,” Auston said, while Mitch cackled. 

“Dude, are you like--”

“I’m not talking about it,” Auston interrupted. 

“Okay, but --”

“No.”

“Well, you can’t fucking bail on the bet, so get your life together.”

“That’s obviously not going to happen,” Auston said. 

“You just really want to get on that ginger dick,” Mitch mused. 

Auston sighed and then smacked Mitch in the crotch. Hard to say how much it was going to hurt because you never knew if you’d get thigh or balls, but Mitch wheezed like Auston had got him real good. 

Great. 

“At least we can tell the boys you touched my dick,” Mitch said, curled up with his hands cupping his balls. He was definitely going to try to get Auston back, but maybe he wanted to catch his breath first. 

“Don’t think I got much of your dick,” Auston said. He looked down at his hands and then over to Mitch. “Want me to try again?”

It was interesting to watch the way Mitch’s face changed from, _you’ve got to fucking be kidding me_ to a more considering look. Auston realized abruptly that they were going to take this too far, at the same time he realized that neither of them were going to stop it. 

“You’ve already butchered my biscuits,” Mitch said, “maybe I’ll do you first.” He looked down at Auston’s lap. 

There was a greater than zero likelihood that Mitch was just going to punch him right back in the nuts, but Auston’s dick had risen and was stubbornly remaining at a solid half chub. He looked thick in his shorts, probably. He could imagine what he looked like to Mitch but he didn’t want to drop his eyes to check. 

“You wanna make out,” Mitch said in that same way he always said things where it sounded kind of like a question, kind of like an exclamation. 

“Something else to tell the boys,” Auston said. 

Mitch bit at the inside corner of his lips. And then he leaned in. 

Oh no, Mitch was putting moves on him. Auston could feel it happening and was only just able to stop himself from recoiling instinctually. His first reaction was to be very embarrassed for Mitch, but that wasn’t right. They had agreed on this. 

Mitch came in mouth-open, and Auston accidentally did the same, so their tongues were kissing before any of the rest of them. It was almost bad but then Mitch flicked the tip of his tongue against the tip of Auston’s, teasing, almost a tickle, and then went in deeper, and just like that Auston wanted it. 

He grabbed Mitch’s upper arms, tried to pull him… somewhere, he didn’t know where. He wanted to move Mitch but he didn’t know where he wanted him to go. They ended up bearing into each other at a terrible angle, not sitting and not lying down, but neither of them let up long enough to move to a better position. 

Auston’s brain kept seesawing. It was the same as kissing a girl. No, it was different. But it was still just kissing. But it wasn’t the same. But it wasn’t different. 

They kept kissing in that stupid in between zone where it wasn’t gentle and it wasn’t passionate. It was going somewhere, but not fast enough and Auston couldn’t stand the build. He pushed Mitch down on the bed, planted his hands on either side of Mitch’s head, and kissed him like he was someone Auston wanted to have sex with. 

“Dude, you’re like fully choking me with your tongue,” Mitch said, sounding not at all upset about it. He twisted his head like he wanted Auston to kiss his neck. 

“I’ll choke you with something else,” Auston said. He bit at Mitch’s earlobe and was only a little surprised when Mitch let out a tiny breathy grunt.

“Not tonight,” Mitch said. He reached for Auston’s wrist, pulled at it like he wanted Auston to put his hands down his pants, so Auston did. It took two tries, because Mitch’s jeans were too tight for Auston to do much, but after Auston undid the button and the zipper, Mitch’s dick was right there. It was kind of hot how it was still in his underwear. Auston could see the whole hard line of it, Mitch’s boxer briefs hiding nothing. He touched Mitch through the fabric. He felt really fucking hard, even though his boxers. 

Mitch squirmed, then his hands came down to push his underwear away. He only got them down to his thighs, maybe, but Auston lost track, because there was Mitch’s dick. It was nicer looking than Auston thought it would be. Thicker. 

He slid his hand around Mitch’s dick. It was kind of like nothing. Anyone could decide to have sex with anyone, if they wanted to. 

Mitch took off his own shirt. He was quieter than Auston would have guessed, but he responded with his body. He wanted a lighter grasp than Auston liked on himself. Auston spat in his hand, got Mitch’s cock real wet, but Mitch didn’t go real crazy for it until some of the spit had worn away and there was an edge of friction. He was leaking enough at that point that Auston didn’t have to lick his hand again, although he would have if he was doing himself because he liked it wet. 

If Auston had been having sex with a girl, he would have been all over her, getting his face in her breasts, using his other hand to grab her ass or rub at her pubic bone. He felt removed from Mitch; the only place they were touching was his hand on Mitch’s dick. He didn’t know if guys licked each other’s nipples and he didn’t really want a mouth full of chest hair anyway. Maybe giving a handjob was just less intimate than fingering a girl or… he didn’t know what it would be like if he fingered Mitch. That seemed like too much to try. 

Mitch looked different when he was turned on, like some of the edges of his face had softened. His brow wrinkled, mouth dropped open. Sometimes, when Auston twisted his hand just right around the head of Mitch’s cock, Mitch scrunched up his face in what looked like a wince, and bit his lower lip. Auston could imagine someone wanting to put their dick in Mitch’s mouth. 

He dropped down, crouched awkwardly over Mitch’s body so he could keep working Mitch’s dick, and bit Mitch’s lip for him. Mitch grabbed Auston’s shoulder, moved his hand up to the back of Auston’s head, twisted his head back and whimpered when Auston bit his neck as well. Auston couldn’t hold himself up like this for long, all his weight on his own hand while the other jerked Mitch off, but he noticed the slide of his hand getting abruptly easier and realized it was because Mitch had come.

Auston kept jerking him off a little longer, because he wasn’t sure if Mitch was still coming or what, and then made his tongue fat to lick one last time over Mitch’s neck. Mitch groaned at that, but they were done the sex now, so Auston was allowed to laugh at him. 

“Let me live,” Mitch complained, shoving Auston away. He wrapped his arms around himself, shaking a little in the comedown. 

Auston left him to that, and went to wash his hands in the ensuite. Apparently neither of them had used the bathroom yet, because the soap was still wrapped in paper. Auston had already ran his hands under the water before he realized that, so the paper got wet and difficult when Auston tried to unwrap it. 

After Auston dried his hands, he looked in the mirror, doing an automatic hair check (fine, just sticking up on one side, and easily smoothed back down). He felt preemptively irritated thinking about how he was going to get off, because if Mitch had fallen asleep, was Auston going to come back and jerk off in the bathroom? Now that he’d touched Mitch’s dick, was it fine just to do it in the same room? Did Auston even care that much about getting off?

But when he stepped out of the bathroom, Mitch got out of bed immediately. Seemed like it didn’t take him that long to get a second wind. He pushed Auston back against the wall, leaned in until their faces were so close to touching but didn’t actually kiss Auston, which was somehow even hotter than if he had. 

He got Auston’s dick out with quick hands and didn’t chirp Auston when it took him a sec to get all the way hard again. Auston felt like he was close basically as soon as he got hard, and he rode the edge of that, Mitch’s hand quick and efficient and not wet enough but also not tight enough for it to matter. It felt like Mitch was a sex tornado that was wrapping Auston up tighter and tighter, and it was sort of hot for being so utilitarian. 

He started to come before he even realized that he had tipped over the edge, so his orgasm had this double whammy where he was coming and then he knew he was coming and that took him even higher. His legs almost gave out. He couldn’t believe he could come this hard and keep standing, but he managed it. Stayed quiet, too, except when Mitch rubbed at the head of his cock when he was basically all the way through coming and it was so intense Auston almost had to kick out. 

“Ew,” Mitch said, holding up his hand, which was covered in Auston’s come. A bunch of it had pooled in the webbing between his thumb and first finger. Auston swatted him away, and then, after Mitch skirted around him to go to the bathroom himself, Auston sagged back against the wall because he’d almost fallen over. 

He put his hands over his eyes. His body wanted to be touched more, even though he was also right on the threshold of overstimulation. He rubbed his face. It felt good to push on his eyeballs. He heard the water turn off in the bathroom and made himself stop so that he could get into the other bed before Mitch got back to the bedroom. 

It would give them something to talk about at the very least. Mitch could complain that Auston had taken the not-sex bed, and Auston could say Mitch hadn’t shottied it, and Mitch could say he always got the bed by the window. Auston was bored just thinking the conversation through, and when Mitch came out of the bathroom, he just looked at Auston and got into his own bed. Auston thought about saying what he’d been thinking - if they’d been lying in the same bed (if Mitch had been getting back into bed with him), he would have. He would have whispered that he wanted to bug Mitch, and Mitch probably would have said that he knew that, and they would have laughed about how they’d had the whole conversation in their heads, and they’d both known it and still felt like they needed to share the knowing of it out loud. 

But Mitch was in a different bed and Auston only probably knew what he was thinking right now, and it only took him three tries of almost falling asleep and then immediately startling himself awake by remembering that he had touched Mitch’s dick before he fell asleep for real. 

\--

So they’d had sex and the whole point was to have something to tell the boys but Auston couldn’t. 

Nazem was talking shit about how he was going to give the younger guys his little black book now that he was married, and Auston was pretending he didn’t know what a little black book was (even though he and Mitch had watched that old movie Hitch during one of their date nights, so actually he did) just to give Naz shit about being elderly, so Naz switched to trolling him about how Mitch was the closest he’d get to a pussy until they gave up on the bet, and Auston thought about saying, _I can tell you what Mitch’s hand looks like when it’s covered in my come_ , or even, _I can buy my own fucking car. My contract’s going to be three times yours_ , but he just said, “I think you’d better hold on to that book for when your wife leaves you for someone whose dick still works.”

The guys had liked that one, which made Naz mad for real. 

“Yeah, and how’s your dick been working for Mitch these days?” Nazem asked. “At some point, we’re going to have to call this bet.”

“I almost forgot about that,” Morgan said, laughing. “Oh man, we’re going to have to buy those Bruins jerseys.”

“That’s disgusting, don’t buy them,” Zach said. “I’m sure we could just borrow some.”

“Or Auston and Mitch could fuck,” William said, grinning. 

“And that’s even more disgusting,” Brown said. 

“Yeah, who’s got a buddy on the Bruins? Someone should hit them up.”

“Fucking Union Station,” James said, shaking his head. “That’s going to be epic.”

“What’s the bet for?” William asked. “Just like four hours, right? That’s not even that long.”

“I think I’d rather wear a Bruins jersey for twelve hours than have sex with a dude,” Jake said. 

“It wouldn’t even be that bad,” said Carrick. 

“Sex with a dude?” Morgan asked. 

“No, wearing the jersey.”

“You guys should just call it and take the forfeit,” said James. “No one actually expects you guys to go through with it.”

“Well, we already did, so how about that,” Mitch snapped.

It wasn’t like the room suddenly got quiet, because the room was never quiet unless Babcock started talking in his angriest whisper, but things got a lot stiller all of a sudden. 

“Oh my god, you guys fucked?” Nazem exclaimed. 

Mitch was suddenly silent, Auston noticed. Fucking hell of a time to remember that not every single thing needed to be said. It seemed like everyone was staring them, except for Freddie, who was steadily packing up his gear, and Matt, who was taking a great interest in his own knees. 

“Wait? Does this mean they won the bet?” Carrick asked. “I feel like...fucking probably counts.”

“We just jerked each other off, jesus,” Auston said when it was clear they were actually waiting for an answer. 

“Oh, that’s nothing,” William said. 

“We’re not buying you guys a car for touching peens,” said Nazem. “That’s like just some bored-in-juniors shit.”

“Okay, saving the questions for what Naz got up to in juniors for another time, the bet was for them to _date_ , and like maybe the kids are doing it different these days but you guys still just seem like friends,” Patty said. “Maybe even kind of less friends than you were before all this shit started.” 

“Friends who touched dicks,” Mitch said, sounding more petulant than he likely intended to.

“Oh god, I’m picturing it.” Zach groaned. 

“We don’t want to hear about that,” said Bozak, pretending to gag. 

“You wanted to hear about it when you thought I fucked those twins,” Auston said. 

“Oh man,” Brown said. “Remember that?”

“What actually happened there?” Carrick asked. “I feel like I missed the end of that night.”

Auston squished his lips together and rubbed at the underside of his nose with his upper lip. He was just going to let the guys talk that one out, when Freddie interrupted, way louder than he usually was, saying, “They were two fucking blonde girls with fake tits who looked nothing alike if you goons spent even one second looking at their fucking faces.”

Auston froze, then remembered to return his face to a more normal expression. 

“Maybe they were cousins,” Brown said. He was too far away for Auston to hit, because _shut up_ , but fuck.

“Maybe they were cousins,” Freddie repeated, with absolutely zero intonation. “Because we’d rather hear about incest.”

No one said much after that. Some of the older guys were tossing looks around like, _You say something_ , _No, you say something_ , but none of them did. Freddie seemed very loud as he finished getting ready to go, even though he wasn’t actually making noise. He left the room without another word. 

Matt went over and sat by Mitch’s stall, pausing to give Auston a fist bump on the way, and then bumping Mitch as well. It looked like he was going to wait for Mitch to finish so they could leave together, but Auston rushed through packing up the rest of his stuff and was out of there before both of them. 

He jogged to the parking garage, and found Freddie sitting in his car, which was turned on, but still in park. He didn’t unroll his window until Auston tapped on it. 

Auston hoped Freddie would say something, but of course he didn’t. What Auston ended up coming up with was, “They weren’t related. Those girls.” Which of course helped nothing at all. 

“I really don’t care,” Freddie said. 

“It just kind of happened with Mitch,” Auston started. 

“I don’t want to hear about it,” Freddie interrupted. 

“Why not?” Auston asked.

“I don’t know,” Freddie said meanly. “Why do you think I would not want to hear about you with someone else?” 

“It’s not --” 

“I keep thinking… I don’t know if it’s worse if you like it with him or you don’t. Maybe you’ll try it and you’ll hate it and then you won’t ever try sleeping with another guy again. But that might be _him_ , and maybe you’d like it better with -- Or you’ll like it with him, and maybe that’s worse because it’s Mitch, and you only like it because he’s all --” Freddie waved his hand, and Auston thought he would leave it at that, but then Freddie said: “twinky, and happy, and not actually gay.”

“Fred,” Auston started.

“I’d make it good,” Freddie said, sounding exhausted. “That’s what I keep thinking about.”

Auston opened his mouth, but Freddie shook his head. 

“No, I’m done.” He rolled up his window, put his car in reverse, and started driving away. It was a fucking dick move, because Auston was right there, but he drove really, really slowly so it’s not like there was actually any chance he could have hit Auston. 

Auston still felt like he had been been in a minor car accident, but just like. On the inside.


	5. Part Five

Once he got over the uncomfortable edge of exposure -- thinking about the other guys thinking about him jerking Mitch off. Thinking about the other guys wondering about them fucking. Thinking about Mitch knowing what Auston’s hand felt like on his dick. But once he’d gotten over that, he felt fine about the whole thing. 

Well, he didn’t so much get over it as eat about ten of the tiny cubed weed jellies that he kept in his freezer for emergencies, but being stoned helped for sure. He ate edibles instead of smoking, and didn’t do it that much, but like fuck it was good to be stoned. 

It was a full and slow body high that fell over him like a sunrise. He was worried and then he wasn’t. His body went away and then came back again. It was going to be fine. He just needed to sleep. 

He went to bed and realized that he was too horny to sleep. It took him a long time to remember what he had to be horny about, but then Freddie’s little speech came back to him, and _he’d make it good_ , oh god. He said he’d make it good.

Auston spent a full hour just jerking off, partly because he liked the lengthy build and partly because the pot was really slowing his dick down. He thought about fucking Freddie, because that’s really what his brain had latched on to. Having jerked Mitch off, there was a whole new dimension to the fantasy, because Auston knew what Mitch’s dick felt like in his hand: he could imagine what Freddie’s would feel like if he reached around to jerk him off while fucking him. Just lightly, maybe, like he was doing for himself that night. Drag it out. Make him want it like Auston did. 

\--

Auston was sort of over the drama, so he texted Freddie, _Want to hang out tonight?_ to see if he could get away with it. 

And he could, because Freddie texted back, _Yeah_. 

Freddie was coming to Auston’s, and Auston spent most of the early evening having a shower (first he used his electric razor to give himself a trim; he wondered if he should do something about his ass and ended up just going with sudsy fingers in the shower) and very little of the evening actually tidying up. By the time Freddie rang the door buzzer, Auston was trying to wrangle the dirty clothes he’d piled into the closet such that he could also close the door. It still felt like more work than he wanted to do given that he wasn’t sure - not _sure_ sure, anyway -- that they’d have sex, but at the very least it would make it nice for when he jerked off later that night. 

Freddie knocked at the door. Auston had already unlocked it for him, but he pretended to play with the deadbolt before opening the door just so Freddie wouldn’t know. 

Freddie had shaved. He was wearing a bright blue scarf. They were definitely going to have sex tonight. 

The thing about having sex was like basically if you sat on the couch long enough, sex was going to happen. Auston had seen other guys psych themselves out too much. Just because they were going after a dime, they thought it meant they needed some kind of plan, but like. Sit on a couch. That was all the plan you needed. 

He got himself and Freddie beers, opened up the caps for both of them in the kitchen and even threw them away right away. He did that stupid hosting dance, where he handed Freddie his beer, then asked if he wanted water and Freddie said sure, so he went back for that, then he thought maybe he should have some water as well. 

“Do you want something to eat?” he asked. 

“You can sit down,” Freddie said, which was good, because Auston had nothing in the way of snacks. He would have had to like make them both scrambled eggs or something. 

Auston sat beside Freddie right away. Other times, with someone he didn’t know as well maybe, he would have started on one of the chairs and made his way over to the couch as time passed. Don’t want to come on too strong. But tonight felt like a sure enough thing. 

“Should I put something on?” Auston asked. 

Freddie said, “Sure,” looked over at Auston and didn’t look away when he realized Auston was looking back. When he moved, it was just to bend one leg so that he could scootch around to face Auston with more of his body. His leg was really long, so it bumped up against Auston’s thigh. 

Auston let his hand fall down, kind of natural, almost. He touched Freddie’s knee. Freddie slouched so he could rest his cheek against the back of the couch. Neither of them said anything about the movie. 

Auston stroked Freddie’s knee, then his thigh. His hand travelled higher and higher in little increments. Pretty soon he was going to be able to touch Freddie’s dick, which was hard enough now that Auston could see the line of it in Freddie’s jeans. He knew which side Freddie had dressed this morning. 

He was so busy staring at Freddie’s dick, calculating the diminishing distance between it and his fingers, that he was surprised when Freddie moved. He looked up, and Freddie’s face was right there. Auston thought, _Fuck_ , and made himself wait. They were both waiting, maybe. Giving each other a chance to shut it down. 

Auston leaned in, and Freddie didn’t pull away, and then they were kissing. 

They kissed, readjusted, kissed again, for longer this time, and then longer yet again, until they were making out. It was nothing like kissing Mitch. Freddie sucked at Auston’s tongue and Auston felt his bones turn to lava. 

Auston didn’t know how to get closer. They could lie down, but the couch was too small, and Auston just wanted Freddie everywhere, he wanted Freddie’s whole entire body and his mouth and his tongue. 

“Do you want to go --” Auston said, breathless. 

“Yeah.” 

They bumped into Auston’s recycling bucket in the hallway, and it made a horrible jangling sound.

“You have to steer,” Auston said.

“I’m also distracted,” Freddie said, and then they were kissing again. 

Auston walked backwards into a wall before he got to the actual door of his bedroom, and then they were inside his bedroom, still making out. Kissing someone who was basically Auston’s height was amazing because they lined up just right. Auston could get his hands all over Freddie’s ass, grinding up against him. He forgot about his bed until Freddie guided them away from the wall and then down on the mattress, and then finally they had to stop making out long enough to sort out all of their limbs. 

They squirmed up to the head of the bed, heads side by side on the same pillow. Freddie touched Auston’s face. He looked at Auston with an intensity that Auston couldn’t match, so he just lay there and let himself be looked at. He could see the moment when Freddie decided to kiss him again, and it was so fucking hot to see Freddie wanting him. And then to feel it, when Freddie fit their mouths together again. 

“Is this okay?” Freddie asked, pulling briefly out of the kiss. His accent gave his words a little trill. He sounded breathless and wanting. 

“Yes. Good,” Auston said. 

They kissed like that, slow like the pillow was cocooning the moment, and then Auston lifted his knee up to rest on Freddie’s thigh, fitting closer and closer together until all slowness was lost. 

Freddie lifted up on one arm, crawled on top of Auston with his hand wrapped around the leg Auston had up so that they didn’t lose any of the closeness. When they settled, Auston’s legs were spread, Freddie lying between them. 

It was a weird position. His legs were spread too much. It wasn’t -- his body wasn’t supposed to respond like this. He couldn’t stop grinding his cock against Freddie. 

“Good?” Freddie asked. 

Auston forced himself to open his eyes. His dick was smearing his underwear with precome. He was so fucking hard.

No one had ever checked in with him this many times, and he was so fucking hot for it, the constant confirmation of wanting. “Yeah, are you okay?” Auston asked.

“Yeah,” Freddie said. He shifted over Auston, like he was switching the arm he was using to hold up his weight. The new angle was even better, and Auston made a high noise that sounded like a whimper. 

Freddie kissed him after that, just quick, hard, not even with any tongue. Auston wanted to be kissed more, but when Freddie pulled back it was to say, “Can I suck your dick?”

“Fuck,” Auston said, nodding. 

Freddie was good not just at sucking dick, but the whole thing. He undressed Auston and it was hot, not only functional. He kissed Auston’s neck and his chest and his thighs and he made these little noises while he was sucking Auston off like he actually _liked_ it. He paused long enough to lick at Auston’s balls, his fingers doing fucking _something_ , Auston didn’t even know what. It felt like Freddie knew Auston’s body better than he did. Auston didn’t know he was capable of feeling this way. 

Freddie even knew how to do it so that Auston didn’t shoot off immediately, which was fucking generous of him and something Auston knew he got absolutely zero credit for. Eventually, Freddie slowed it down and then started this purposeful build, like he knew exactly where they were going, and yes, fuck, Auston wanted to go wherever Freddie wanted to take him. And apparently where Freddie wanted to take him was to an orgasm so strong Auston lost control of his body (trembling) and voice (crying out the entire time he came) and brain (gone, so gone). 

Freddie stayed down there for a long time, and still it seemed like Auston might still be coming when he finally pulled away. Maybe that was just the aftershocks. Freddie lay down beside him, and didn’t try to kiss him. Auston didn’t know if that was because Freddie didn’t want to kiss, or because he thought Auston wouldn’t want to taste his own come, but like Auston really wanted a kiss, so he leaned in. Even after all that, it was a relief when Freddie kissed him back. 

Auston felt like he had about a thousand things to say, but he could tell Freddie was hard (even after sucking his dick, and fuck), so he pawed at Freddie until Freddie lay on his back and then crawled down the bed to settle between Freddie’s legs. 

He realized one he was down there that he hadn’t taken off Freddie’s shirt or done any of that sexy kissing stuff Freddie had done. It seemed like it would be more awkward to head back up and try again, so Auston stayed where he was. He was already super resigned to being the one who didn’t know what he was doing; not really anything he could do about that now. 

He really liked the look of Freddie’s hard dick in his jeans, and opening up his pants to get at his dick was weirdly fun. Auston kind of wanted to pass out from how hard he’d come, but even more than that he wanted to get Freddie off. For the most part, he thought the idea of using sex to express feelings was some boring bullshit, but in the moment he felt pretty overwhelmed with whatever feeling _I came so fucking hard I lost my vision_ was, and sucking Freddie’s dick felt like a good way to express that. 

It was pretty easy to have sex with a guy without taking off many of his clothes, which was probably why it was hot the way Freddie had undressed him. Yet another thing that Auston wasn’t managing himself, but he did get Freddie’s dick out and like. Even if Auston hadn’t gone off like a freight train, he would still want to suck this dick. He held it in his hand and was momentarily thrown by how thick it felt. He felt frozen and then he realized that what he was feeling was extremely turned on. Not in his dick, which was still recovering, but in his hand, which really liked the feel of Freddie’s cock. His hand was turned on. 

He dropped his head down. It turned out his mouth was turned on as well, opening up for Freddie’s cock. He realized it tasted fine as this distant afterthought, already trying to get as much of it in his mouth as possible. It tasted fine. There was nothing horrible about this. His hand and his mouth were horny for Freddie’s dick. He hadn’t known it would feel this good, but it did. 

He went down as far as he could on Freddie’s dick. It took so much fucking concentration. If he breathed at the wrong time, he could feel his gag reflex kicking in and he had to pull up again, which just started the whole progress of opening up his throat all over again from the beginning. 

He could take Freddie all the way to the back of his throat if he timed everything right. It made Freddie groan, and otherwise stay very, very still. After the second time, Auston’s throat started to hurt. He went down a third time. Fuck. He couldn’t keep doing this long enough to make Freddie come. He pulled off and used his hand while he tried to swallow away the tightness in his throat. 

“You want to stop?” Freddie asked. 

Auston dropped down to mouth at the head of Freddie’s cock. He looked up for the first time since he’d started, and realized that Freddie was staring down at him. Auston closed his eyes, stuck out his tongue. He mouthed at the head of Freddie’s cock noisily, imagined Freddie looking down at him, seeing his tongue, hearing the wet sucking sounds of his mouth. 

He pulled off only long enough to say, “I want to make you come.”

“You’re going to,” Freddie said, and fuck that got Auston going. He found a better balance on his elbow so that he could use his other hand on Freddie’s cock instead of just to hold himself up on the bed. He held Freddie’s dick at the base, using his thumb to brush against Freddie’s balls when he remembered, and jerked at Freddie’s shaft with his other hand while he kept sucking at the head. 

Auston didn’t realize how badly he wanted to be touched until Freddie’s hand was in his hair and he was so relieved he almost choked on Freddie’s cock. Freddie’s fingers made his scalp tingle. Even though he’d already come, Auston felt like he was still turned to one hundred. He didn’t know when the comedown was going to start; it felt miles away. 

It was kind of like he was making out with the head of Freddie’s dick and the circle of his own hand. He didn’t know if he was doing it right. It felt really good to him, and he wasn’t sure what that meant. Was he licking his own hand too much? It was difficult not to. Just like when two bodies finally lined up properly and fucking started to feel like sex, giving Freddie this blowjob felt like sex now. It felt like… his mouth and his hand and he was bobbing his hand and Freddie was also rocking up a little, like they were moving together. It didn’t feel like Freddie was fucking his mouth, but that probably would have also been alright. 

Freddie tasted like he smelled, and it coated Auston’s entire mouth. Most of his face, too, since it was a fucking sloppy blowjob. Auston liked it wet on his dick and it turned out he also really liked it wet when he was sucking someone else’s dick. He hoped it was okay for Freddie. He’d felt right at the edge of his limits when he tried to take Freddie’s cock down his throat, but he could go like this for fucking ages. Like this, he didn’t want to stop. 

Freddie said, “I’m gonna come,” and Auston thought about pulling off, but he was into the hand and mouth thing he’d worked out so he stayed like that. Freddie didn’t come right after he said that, so Auston kept working him. It took long enough that Auston wondered if he actually was going to come, and then he did. The taste of his come was fucking intense, so Auston didn’t close his mouth over the head. He just kept it there, tongue out, lips parted, let Freddie come in his mouth and then drip down over his fist. It was a huge fucking mess, and Auston hoped that Freddie didn’t mind. Auston knew he was doing a lot of what he wanted, but it was usually hot when the person who was doing stuff to you was into it, so he hoped that was the case this time. 

Auston sat back. He tried to wipe off his face with his hands, but that didn’t work because his hands were covered with spit and come. He could taste Freddie’s jizz in weird places, like down his throat and in the little dip just behind his upper lip. His mouth felt ravaged in a way that was sort of the same and also very different from the exhausted tongue ache that came from doing down on a girl. 

Auston said, “I’ve got to just go to the bathroom, okay?” as he looked up at Freddie. Freddie nodded and gave him this smile like, fuck. He was so fucking hot. Auston almost couldn’t stand looking at him. He stood up and walked around to the side of the bed. Freddie opened up his arms and let Auston hug him, this weird bent over smush that he probably shouldn’t be doing naked, but like. It felt really good. He still wanted to be touched. He had equally pressing needs to be as close to Freddie as possible and to clean his face, which was quickly crusting. 

He straightened up a little, but gave up on that and dropped his head to press his forehead to Freddie’s collarbone. 

“I’m so sticky,” he complained. His mouth was against Freddie’s bare skin and he gave it a little lick. 

Freddie tickled the back of Auston’s head and then pet his hair. He said, “Let’s both go to the bathroom,” and waited until Auston nodded before he move his hand away. Standing up and walking was annoying, but it was better now that Freddie was coming with him. 

As soon as Freddie stood up, Auston remembered that he’d forgotten to undress him, so he did that on the way to the bathroom, laughing as Freddie’s jeans got caught around his ankles and he almost tripped. He kept plucking at Freddie’s t-shirt while Freddie laughed and squirmed. They had to take a break in the hallway to finish getting Freddie naked, which was a weird place to do it, but it was _great_ because then he was naked and Auston could see his whole body. 

They took turns washing their faces and rinsing out their mouths. Auston brushed his teeth and then offered his toothbrush to Freddie, who took it. A month ago, Auston would have bet money that Freddie would refuse to use anyone else’s toothbrush, let alone Auston’s. It was one thing for Freddie to suck his dick, but that was just sex. Auston felt stupidly possessive over the intimacy.

Auston detoured to the kitchen to get them glasses of water, and then went back to bed. Freddie was still naked, which was good. Auston also didn’t want to put his own clothes on. 

They sat down and had about two sips of water each before they were setting the glasses on the bedside table so they could press their bodies together. Freddie was still kind of half-sitting. Auston pressed his face into Freddie’s belly, his arm resting across Freddie’s thighs. 

“You’re fucking good at sex,” Auston said. 

“Eh,” Freddie said. 

“What?” Auston said. “You are.”

“I’m good at some things. Some sex things,” he said, moving lower on the bed so that his body pressed all the way along Auston’s. “But I’m not like -- I’ve been with guys where you like _learn things_ from sleeping with them. I’m not good like that. I just know some stuff.”

“I still can’t feel like three of my fingers,” Auston said. It was three fingers on each hand, he wanted to clarify, but Freddie had already gathered his hands up and was rubbing them between his own. He kissed Auston’s fingers, ran his tongue over the very tips of them like he was tracing the little crescents of Auston’s nails. 

This was how people got needy after sex, Auston realized. It was from being treated with this kind of care. So much gentleness opened up an unfillable chasm of need. 

“Why did you stop sending me snaps?” Auston asked.

“You were fucking killing me with those selfies,” Freddie said. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Auston nuzzled into Freddie’s shoulder and didn’t say anything. He was getting into the danger zone where soon he’d fall asleep, and he and Freddie hadn’t talked about Freddie staying the night. He didn’t want to fall asleep and wake to find Freddie gone.

“I’m like passing out,” Auston said. 

“You can stay in bed,” Freddie said. “Your door locks automatically, right?”

“Mh hm,” Auston said. He thought about offering to let Freddie stay, but he didn’t want Freddie to say no. He watched as Freddie hunted for his clothes in the dark room. Neither of them said anything, but the vibe was like quiet, sleepy. Not tense. Freddie looked good out of his clothes and he looked good putting them back on. Auston’s arms felt like they wanted to touch Freddie again, so he pulled the sheets up all the way to his chin. 

Freddie was dressed now. He smiled and bumped his leg against the mattress, then he left. 

Auston thought he’d pass out right away, but he didn’t. With Freddie gone, he felt suddenly wide awake. He wanted to move, maybe. Or he wanted to sleep but he thought he couldn’t. He checked his phone. There was nothing new that was of interest. He went to his texts and very carefully did not pull up the thread with Freddie. 

He found Mitch’s name instead and texted, _Sorry dude we’re going to lose that bet._

\--

They played the Ducks and Kesler was an absolute dickstain from start to finish. Auston shoved and yelled and didn’t really manage to give it as good as he got it but like damn if he didn’t try. He would have been madder, but they won. 

He didn’t know why Freddie wasn’t in a better mood. He was quiet after the game, and left for his car without really saying anything to Auston, so Auston had to follow after him.

“You wanna hang out?” Auston asked after he’d chased Freddie down. 

“Not tonight,” Freddie said. 

“Dude.” 

“Dude,” Freddie parroted. He rolled his eyes. 

“Just fucking come over and we won’t have to talk in the parking garage.”

“I don’t think we can hook up again,” Freddie said. 

“Why?” Auston demanded. “If you’re worried about the team, I feel like I should super get credit for hooking up with _Mitch_ and not making things weird. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“Because it’s different.” Freddie’s voice was so faint. It sounded like he was talking to a spot just inches away from his mouth. Auston, a whole four feet away, could barely hear him. 

“I know, I --” 

“I want to date you. Not so someone will buy me a car.” Freddie kept talking. “I want to suck your dick.”

“I want to suck your dick,” Auston said. 

“You called Kesler a cocksucker like one hour ago.”

“I didn’t mean it like gay,” Auston said. “I mean. Yes. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

Freddie was still for a moment, and then he smiled. It wasn’t a very happy smile, but it still looked lovely on his face. Auston hated himself for noticing. 

Freddie said, “I’m not mad at you.” He smiled again, or some more.

“No, Freddie, please,” Auston said. He didn’t know what was happening. The only thing he could think to do was beg. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m really sorry.”

“Let’s just forget about it,” Freddie said. 

“Freddie --”

“No, this was…” 

It was what? But Freddie didn’t finish his sentence. It was good, Auston thought. That’s why Freddie couldn’t say it was a mistake. He was still going to fully cut Auston out, though. Auston could see that, and he could also see that little sliver of net. Freddie hadn’t blocked him out entirely yet. 

“I called the bet with Mitch,” Auston said. 

“What?”

“You were right.” Auston put his hands in his pockets. They had been fighting, but suddenly he knew they weren’t any more. Freddie didn’t know it yet, so he still looked tense, but Auston felt so suddenly stupidly happy that his body hardly knew what to do with itself. “What Mitch and I were doing was nothing like dating. We lost that bet real hard.”

“Real hard,” Freddie repeated, solemnly, but like sly-solemn so Auston knew he was making a joke. 

“So, like. I’m probably available to date someone for real now.” Auston wanted to look at Freddie while he said it, but he couldn’t manage to. He used up all of his bravado to keep his voice the right amount cocky, to make it clear what he was asking for. 

After a torturous moment of silence, he finally managed to drag his eyes up to Freddie’s face. Freddie was stonewalling him hard, so Auston looked back down again. Nothing to do when Freddie was looking like that. 

He clenched his hands, still in his pockets, and then pulled them out. He looked down at his thumbnail, blackened from a slash, and then at his feet, Freddie’s feet… finally all the way back up to Freddie’s face again. He’d softened and he softened more when he saw Auston was looking at him. 

“Such a fucking bad idea,” Freddie said. 

“Oh, for sure,” said Auston. 

“You’re going to be a terrible boyfriend. Everything you learned was from Mitch.”

“Yeah,” Auston said. He’d lost complete control over his face and was smiling so hard that his cheeks hurt. “You’re going to have to take it up with him.”

\--

They went back to Freddie’s place that night. Freddie was kind of firm about that, for reasons Auston didn’t understand until they were naked in bed together and Auston realized that Freddie wanted to be close to this specific kind of lube that he liked.

There were a lot of things about fucking Freddie that Auston’s daydreams had missed, like how he smelled when Auston kissed along the line of his shoulders. The way he sounded when Auston bottomed out. How fucking intimate it was and then how fucking carefully he had to watch himself because he was super close to blurting out some shit about being in love with Freddie and that was a real party foul given that they were about two hours into dating. 

He got Freddie to come first and felt like a fucking stud about it, and then he came like the entire world was going to end from it, and had to hold on to Freddie for a long time while he came down. 

When Auston stopped panting, he started to release his grip on Freddie and realized that Freddie was clinging even harder than Auston was. 

“Hey, you okay?” Auston asked.

“Yeah,” Freddie said. He loosened his grip only enough that they could shift together, moving in unison, so that Freddie could press his face into Auston’s neck. He caught one of Auston’s ankles between his toes. 

It felt like they were still fucking, kinda. So much closeness it was almost inseparable from sex. 

\--

On the next road game, Mitch came to Auston’s room to play Chel. Now that they weren’t dating, it was way more fun to hang out with him. 

“So, like good job landing Freddie,” Mitch said while they waited for their guys to stop cellying. Auston had won this game and he wanted to bask in the glory. 

“Yeah,” Auston said, sounding way more smug than was probably polite. He caught himself and said, “You’re not pissed, right?”

“Not happy about the bet,” Mitch said. He twisted his controller in his hands and then set it down on the bed. “So, I guess I hooked up with Marty.” His voice cracked a little when he added, “And Syd.”

“You were the one who said no threesomes,” Auston said. 

“Yeah, well.”

“You’re blushing,” Auston said, just realizing it. “Was it that good?”

“Umm,” Mitch rubbed at the back of his head. “Yeah. They both… I guess they both, um, like me.”

“First time for everything,” Auston said.

“You’re such a fucking dick,” Mitch said. “I’m glad Freddie has to deal with you now.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a couple of people to deal with you now,” Auston said.

“You know I’m a handful,” Mitch said, which made Auston think about his dick. It was obviously not a thought he wanted to dwell on, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. There was something to sleeping with someone and actually staying friends with them afterwards, like maybe you were _friends_ friends, like real friends, like the kind of friends that were pretty hard to find. 

“Don’t tell anyone I did this,” Auston said, and then pulled Mitch in for a really fucking long hug.

\--

Auston thought about doing some big gesture in the locker room, but decided to be more lowkey about it because the last few months had been pretty extra and Auston kind of just wanted not to be the center of attention. 

He told Willie about him and Freddie (“That’s chill, I can see that.”), and Zach about being bisexual (“Yeah, kind of figured when you had sex with Marns.”) and Patty about the whole thing (“Bring Freddie over for dinner on Tuesday.”) and then he remembered, what the fuck, he loved being the center of attention, and was all, _I lost the bet and won Freddie’s heart_ after their next home game. 

“Auston, you ho,” Nazem said. “Just making your way around the locker room.”

“How many cars do you think we’re going to owe you for this one?” 

“Nah, it’s Fred we’re going to owe cars to,” Tyler said. “He’s the one who has to put up with all that.” 

“I’m going to get as many cars as I want as soon as Auston signs his contract,” Freddie said. A couple of the guys missed it, because he was quieter than the general clamour of the locker room, but Tyler and Nazem and a few others laughed loudly. 

Auston nodded. He knew that Freddie was just joking and he was being too earnest, like a loser, but he couldn’t help himself. 

“That’s actually pretty smart,” Matt said. “Lock him down when he still doesn’t have much going for him.”

“Excuse you,” Auston said. He floated his hand up and down his torso. “I’m a fucking catch.”

Jake checked Auston out, his eyes moving slowly. “Eh,” he said when he was finally done. “Four out of ten. You better hope you can convince them to give you that McDavid money.”

“He’s definitely not getting McDavid money,” Nazem said. 

“Sorry, bud,” Jake said to Freddie. “You got the rough end of the stick there. The rough end of the stick? The raw end of the stick.” He looked up at the ceiling and then tried again. “The sharp end of the stick?”

“You are so fucking dumb,” said Tyler. 

It was kind of awkward, to be honest. Auston could tell the guys were trying to be chill about it, but he kept catching people looking at him weird. Fuck it, though. People looked at Auston for a lot of different reasons. His main forms of subsistence were boneless skinless chicken breasts and attention. 

“I think you’re worth McDavid money,” Mitch said, kicking at Auston’s foot while he walked by.

“Thanks, Marns. I knew I dated you for a reason.”

Mitch kicked Auston’s foot again, and walked to his own stall. Auston watched Matt watch Mitch. It took an embarrassingly long time for Matt to realize he was being watched. Auston gave him a face-off-focused squint, his own version of Freddie’s stone face. It obviously wasn’t as effective, but Matt seemed to get the message ( _I’m still looking out for Mitch._ ) because he gave Auston a nod and then dropped his head, smiling.

\--

“So what kind of car am I buying you?” Auston asked. They were in Auston’s bed and Freddie was going to stay the night. He’d brought a gym bag with a change of clothes and some toiletries even though he could have just borrowed Auston’s stuff, and Auston liked that. Freddie had come over already prepared to stay. 

“An Escalade,” said Freddie. 

“I’m not buying you a fucking Escalade. You wouldn’t be able to park it.” 

“I need room for all my stuff,” Freddie said. 

“What stuff?”

“Goalie stuff. You wouldn’t understand.” He was poking Auston in the side, and even though Auston had so far managed to keep a straight face, it fucking tickled and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to last much longer.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Auston said, cracking up. He tried to roll away, but Freddie rolled after him. He had discovered this place on Auston’s clavicle that felt like it was directly connected to the bottom of Auston’s feet, which was a weird thing to be a turn on but like Freddie got his mouth there and it went all the way down to Auston’s soles. He made a lot of noise even though he tried not to.

“I really like you,” Auston said when Freddie finally eased up on the life-ruiningly good suction. “I mean like in the gay way. Not like bros. But also like bros. I like you in a lot of ways.”

Freddie kissed him quiet. “You’re embarrassing yourself. Just lie there and try to look good. That’s probably enough for you to try to handle.”

And then he sucked Auston’s dick, and obviously Jake had never been right about one thing in his life, but he had edged near something that resembled actual insight, because, yeah, the blowjobs were awesome. 

“I like you, too,” Freddie said, after he had finished swallowing. 

“You’re just saying that so that I’ll suck you now,” Auston said, already crawling down the bed. 

“Yes,” Freddie said. He touched Auston’s hair. Maybe it was because Auston had already come, but it felt like his scalp had a million nerves. Freddie’s fingers were lighting him up. 

“Unless you get that McDavid money,” Freddie continued. “Then I’ll like you regardless.”

“You’re a dick,” Auston said, one hand still holding the base of Freddie’s cock. 

“Yes,” Freddie said. “Now suck it.” 

And Auston did. 

\--

“Before this day, I’d lived a life of few regrets,” Mitch said. 

They were in Union Station and it was fucking crowded and every single person had a phone, most of which were pointed at them. It was t-minus any minute now before the actual media showed up. Someone had thrown a water bottle at them, and if Mitch hasn’t caught it, it for sure would have hit Auston in the head. 

“Yeah,” Auston said. His Bruins jersey smelled like freshly pressed synthetic defeat. He was going to Freddie’s after this. Matt and Syd were standing in the crowd, each with a phone up filming Mitch. He kept looking their way and mugging. 

“Probably worth it though,” Auston said. And then, “Oh, shit, does that guy have eggs?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who read along and commented while I was posting this. You made it so much fun for me, and I'm massively grateful to you all!!!

**Author's Note:**

> I’m on tumblr [here](http://disarmd.tumblr.com)!


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